


Who We Used to Be

by tastewithouttalent



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bruises, Canon Disabled Character, Developing Relationship, Dreams and Nightmares, Hand Jobs, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Love Confessions, M/M, Masturbation, Nostalgia, Past Relationship(s), Phone Calls & Telephones, Phone Sex, Post-Canon, Reminiscing, Reunions, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-10-17 08:12:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 52,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10589973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: "Izaya's lost more than his mobility, has given up more than the comfortable familiarity of well-known streets and the infamy of his name, and there’s no replacement for what he left behind him in Ikebukuro." Izaya finds life after Ikebukuro more peaceful than it is pleasant before nostalgia and an unwary phone call to a familiar number start to shape a new beginning out of the goodbyes he left behind him.





	1. Memory

Things are quieter, after Ikebukuro.

It’s pleasant. Izaya hasn’t had much experience with peace in his life; it’s not something he’s pursued, not even something he’d thought to miss from the structure he made of his life and the city that was so often his plaything as much as his home. Others might complain that the city is too busy, too loud, too hectic; for Izaya it was all part of the fun, the thrill of the people and action around him as much a way to feed the constant thrum of adrenaline in his veins as the danger he toyed with on a daily basis. He had thought, often, that he could be perfectly happy to stay in Ikebukuro forever, with the people and the plots and the entertainment to while away his days from the first glow of dawn at the horizon to the late moonlit hours of the night.

Things are different, now. There’s the wheelchair, for one; so many of Izaya’s old pursuits are simply impossible for him, now, with his legs turned traitor and offering pain much of the time when he could wish for mobility. He can’t indulge in the fights or the chases he used to; even the level of danger he exposes himself to is less, now, when his options for escape are so limited. He doesn’t have a death wish, no matter what some people may say; he’s more interested in continued survival than in an ignoble end in some fight he didn’t choose and can’t escape. So he pulls back from the games, dabbles in the fringes of plots instead of in the thick of them, and if that makes him a spectator to the action more often than a contributor, there’s something to be said for watching, too, and Izaya’s never minded the role of observer. But he’s lost more than his mobility, has given up more than the comfortable familiarity of well-known streets and the infamy of his name, and there’s no replacement for what he left behind him in Ikebukuro.

He thinks about it sometimes. The nights seem longer, now, with the walls of his bedroom around him instead of the streets of the city; Izaya has more time to think than he used to, and more to think about than he ever used to need or want. He tried to avoid it, at first, tried to distract himself with meddling on internet forums or whatever chat rooms he can work himself into; but they’re not interesting enough to hold his attention, and in the end he found himself going silent for minutes at a time while he stared unseeing at the flicker of light from his computer screen and his mind travelled backwards over the weeks and months, back through all the time and all that has been broken to the start, to the hazy nostalgia of the beginning, when Izaya spent his time within the walls of his high school instead of the streets of the city and when the roar of “ _Izaya-kun!_ ” echoed to chase him down the halls with all the fervor of a devoted lover. More recent events are hazy in his memory, shattered apart on too much adrenaline overriding impossible pain, until all Izaya can recall of the cause of his current physical state is the silence, the set jaw and dark eyes and quiet as of death itself hunting him down to put an end to things at last; but he hasn’t lost everything, he can reel himself back to years prior, to the flash of a grin as delighted as it was vicious, to the color of blood soaking into a blue coat, to the grip of inhumanly strong hands at his arms to brace him still against the crush of a hot mouth.

Those were good times. Izaya can recall them with perfect clarity: the burn of excitement in his veins, anticipation running hotter even than instinctive fear of the combat he knew himself to be outmatched in. The burn of laughter in the back of his throat, warmth licking up from his chest to spill past his lips like a taunt, like a dare to keep Shizuo coming, to lift him into insane feats of athleticism as if to prove how desperately his hands craved the feel of Izaya’s body under them. Working around the city like an obstacle course, like the chase was just the foreplay to the main event, until Shizuo was pulled away or -- better -- until Izaya let himself be backed into the shadows and pinned to a wall, until he could taste the hot of Shizuo’s breath panting against his mouth with exertion from the chase turning into a completely different kind of effort. His hair was always damp with sweat, Izaya can remember the feel of it under his fingers, can remember the way it would stick to the inside of his arm when he got his hold up to loop around Shizuo’s neck to brace himself steady; and he was always rough, frantic with want so desperate it invariably left its mark on Izaya’s skin in the form of thumbprints at his arms, bruises on his thighs, the red shape of Shizuo’s mouth dug in so deep at his collarbones that it would linger for days after the fact. Izaya left his own marks -- scratches at Shizuo’s shoulders, teeth biting hard against sweat-warm skin, blood enough to more than match the bruises Shizuo left on him -- and there were always more, new overlapping the old in an endless cycle, a chain of days and chases and culminations stamped onto Izaya’s skin for him to feel out in the shower and smile at in the mirror.

It was never meant to last. Izaya knew that then, he knows it now; there’s no bitterness to his loss, no sense of injustice to it. He kept Shizuo longer than he thought to, longer than he expected he could; and in the end that was his undoing, as it was always going to be. Izaya had weeks, months, years of an illicit indulgence well beyond what he could ever have hoped to keep; his own fault, for lingering so long that he felt the loss, for holding so tightly to something he had never really owned in the first place. He should have left long before, before his memories settled into such clarity, when it was still possible to strip them and his too-much emotions from his self and leave them behind along with all the familiar streets and known faces; but that’s his own mistake, and it’s one he can live with the same way he lives with the ache in his legs and the inconvenience of the wheelchair that so curtails his freedom of movement.

He doesn’t regret the past. That’s not what it is in his thoughts; he doesn’t reflect on Ikebukuro with despair, or with the self-pitying misery that might haunt someone else. It’s just that sometimes he wakes from dreams so clear that he’s left in a haze of memory for the whole of the morning, or he’ll hear a shout from a block away and turn before he can help himself; or he’ll open up his old phone, the one he hasn’t used since Ikebukuro, and scroll through the contacts like he’s flipping through a photo album, like he’s weighting a thumb against the psychological bruise of nostalgia in the back of his mind. There are dozens of contacts, hundreds of acquaintances; all of them lost, as far beyond Izaya’s reach as the walls of the buildings he used to scale so effortlessly in Ikebukuro. There’s something soothing about scrolling through them, about cycling past name after half-remembered name as his memory skips from one recollection to the next, like a flipbook dragged too fast for vision to keep up with the motion of the pages; and then the cursor catches on one name too familiar to skip past, and Izaya is dragged to a halt by the highlighted _Shizu-chan_ blinking back at him from the screen.

It’s strange to see it written out. Izaya never writes Shizuo’s name anymore; no one here has any idea who he is, his name carries no weight either as a threat or a means to stir a quick temper to anger. Izaya wonders how long it’s been since he saw the other’s name in anything other than revisited memories in the late hours of the night; he wonders how long it’s been since he spoke the familiar syllables, since he formed his lips around the lilt worn smooth with repetition and familiarity. He shapes it on his tongue, just for the taste of it again; but his breathing sticks in his chest, his voice clings to his throat, and in the end it goes unspoken, a shell of a name without the air to give it true form.

Izaya ought to scroll past. He knows that. By his own logic he should continue on to the end of his contacts list, and let his mouth curve onto the bittersweet smile that always comes with these minor indulgences, and shut his old phone off before going back out to the city he lives in now instead of owns, to the peace of the life that he is still learning to fit himself into. But his thumb is stalled on the buttons, his gaze is fixed on the screen, and when he moves it’s to open up the call history instead of moving past the listing, to view the records and timestamps dated for the previous months that feel like a lifetime ago. There’s a range of calls, a chain of them going back months, years, in closer proximity to each other as they traverse back over lost time; but within the past year only a handful, a few attempted calls on Izaya’s side that rang through without a pickup and then the last one, dated some six months back and with a shorter duration than any of the others, a bare handful of seconds of connection.

Izaya stares at the record for long moments, working over the mechanical simplicity of the phone log that carries so much emotional weight in his head. He thinks he could recite the entire conversation by memory, from his own rushed spill of frustrated jealousy up to the resonance of Shizuo’s voice, so calm and level and cold like the ice that Izaya had felt slide down his spine with the other’s _goodbye_. It’s crystalline in his head, the last clear memory he has from the smoke and pain and heat of that night, from amid the surge of sensations that never quite managed to overcome the chill awareness of what he had done, of what he had finally broken past repair.

The calculation isn’t hard to do. The date is almost exactly six months back, plus an extra day and less a few hours; Izaya does it without thinking, unconsciously working over the time since he last heard Shizuo’s voice as he stares at the call record. Six months, a few dozen weeks; no time at all, really, in the context of a lifetime, in the context of a future stretching long and peaceful and quiet, quiet like Ikebukuro never was as long as Shizuo was in it. Izaya takes a breath, feels the weight of the air against his tongue and filling the inside of his chest with the potential for voice; and then he reaches out without looking for his current cell phone, the one still shining with the gleam of newness on its edge, and he opens up the screen to dial.

He has to read the number off his old phone. It’s strange to do that too; there was a time when he could have called Shizuo from a pay phone without thinking, for how entirely the other’s number was printed in his memory. Even now the rhythm of it is familiar; he can feel the echo of memory in the back of his head as he reads the numbers, can recognize the shift of his thumb tapping out the buttons like he’s falling back into the steps of some dance forgotten long ago. The number glows on his screen, the shape of it familiar even on the new display; and Izaya’s hand completes the last step of the action without conscious thought, and presses the button to _Call_ before he’s made the decision to do so.

He nearly hangs up as soon as his phone starts ringing. This is a mistake, he can feel it in the rush of adrenaline in his veins and can taste it in the catch of panic in his breathing; he should hang up, he should turn his phone off, he should let the six months spread into seven and ten and twenty, should let the peace of his life continue unobstructed by a return to the past or too-far indulgence in that nostalgia that seemed so safe, before. But his hand is closed tight around his phone, and he can’t catch his breath to decide to hang up, and he’s still trapped by that first surge of startling adrenaline when the ring at his ear cuts off sharply, and there’s a breath of an inhale, and: “Yeah?” clear and calm and absolutely, unmistakably Shizuo.

Izaya nearly drops his phone in his haste to fumble it away from his ear and hit the button to end the call. His hands are trembling, his whole body is shaking; he feels like he’s in freefall, like he’s dropping through unresisting air to topple helplessly towards some as-yet-unfelt collision. His heart pounds, his breathing catches; and in his hand, against his fingers, there’s a timestamp under the nostalgia-familiar phone number, a string of zeros and a single digit to speak to the proof of Shizuo’s voice, of Shizuo’s existence across the distance of a phone line from Izaya’s own.

Izaya’s old phone drops from nerveless fingers, toppling from his grip to hit the floor hard enough to jostle the battery loose and blank the screen to black with the abrupt loss of power. Izaya doesn’t even glance at it. The call record of his newest contact is still on the phone in his hand, even as the backlighting dims and then falls back to the unadorned flat of the lock screen, that too-brief timestamp still there as if to serve as proof of Izaya’s weakness, as if to press the reset button on the counter since his last mistake to zero out those months of restraint in a single moment of impulse.

It’s a long time before Izaya can find his way back to awareness of the present.


	2. Rough

The phone call was a mistake.

Izaya knows that. Izaya knew it was a mistake as he dialed the number, could feel the certainty of his own error settling itself into his veins as he worked through the familiar sequence. It was like a prophecy, as if he could see disaster spelled out as his fate too clearly for even his contrary nature to save him from. He was doomed as soon as he dialed, as soon as he reached for his phone; maybe he was ruined when he scrolled through his old contacts, maybe his fate was sealed the moment he powered on his old phone. He doesn’t know. He spends the night thinking about it -- over and over and over, in the silent hours of the night with nothing but his too-fast breathing and the dark of his ceiling to keep him company -- but he finds no relief for himself, no comfort even in telling himself the lie that he won’t call again.

He can’t stop thinking about it. It was such a short thing, to weigh so heavily on his mind: a few seconds of a ringtone, a breath and a word; and now he lies awake through the endless hours of midnight and beyond, trembling with the adrenaline he thought he was done with resurrected by the sound of Shizuo’s voice ringing in his ears. He sounded the same, unchanged by those months since Izaya left; he sounded impossibly different, calm and relaxed as Izaya can never remember him being before. Was his voice lower, was his tone a little rougher? Is Izaya imagining the shadows of cigarettes on that one word he caught, or the beginnings of a cough on the inhale Shizuo took as he answered? Was he at work, Izaya wonders, was he in the street with Tom at his side and Ikebukuro streets under his feet, or was he at home in the narrow confines of the apartment time has surely stripped of any of Izaya’s fleeting effects upon it? Izaya retraces those few syllables of sound, unravels them down into their component parts and structures them back into their original form; and finds them stripped of their meaning, like the gilt of some toy worked off by too much childish enthusiasm. They’ve become sounds in his memory, mere noise without any of the power they brought originally; and Izaya is left with just the meaninglessness of that one word of polite greeting and an ache in his chest as if from want of air, or like the pain of sensation returning to a long-numb limb.

He lasts for a day. His exhaustion is less of a problem than it once would have been; physical fitness is of far less import in his lifestyle now, and the mental fatigue is hardly something he hasn’t dealt with before. He keeps his phone on the other side of his desk, so he has to stretch to reach for it, so there’s no chance of his too-enthusiastic body making use of it on some instinctive level, and he only makes a handful of calls; better to limit himself to the distance of chat rooms, and the slower pace of forum posts, where he can lose himself to the rhythm of responses and conversations and forget the memory of the person he used to be in the simple pursuit of who he is now. It’s monotonous in a way he often finds comforting, like the psychological equivalent of white noise pattering against his eardrums; but there’s no comfort to it, not now, not when he has the hollowed-out framework of Shizuo’s voice lingering in his thoughts. He finds himself going silent for long stretches of time, staring unseeing at the screen in front of him while his imagination pictures the shape of a familiar telephone number and his fingertips itch to press against the buttons of his phone, and by the time he blinks back into himself he’s lost the thread of the conversation he was in, the discussion has moved on and left him behind once more. Finally he stops trying, logs out entirely and powers down his computer and goes to sit in front of his living room window, gazing down at the street below him and trying to reconstruct the sparkle of Ikebukuro from the unfamiliar pattern of the flickering lights below.

He can’t make it a third night. He knows that, knows it long before he watches the grey of dawn break into blinding brilliance over the horizon he can make out from his window; exhaustion is weighting at his limbs, threatening to pull him into the horrors of nightmares too vivid for his exhausted body to break free of. Sleep will come for him tonight, whether he wants to face it or not; and if he doesn’t give the restless churning of his thoughts something to fixate on, he’ll lose more even than he stands to give up by capitulating to temptation.

It’s not like it matters that much, Izaya tells himself as he tabs through the options on his phone, circling his way around to his call history to bring up the proof of that momentary interaction yesterday. His phone number is impossible to link to his name, even for someone with his own connections; Shizuo will never be able to tell it’s him, will never have the least idea who it is calling him. It’s a stranger, as far as Shizuo is concerned; he probably won’t even consider Izaya’s name in the process, he’ll just think it’s a wrong number or a prank call. And Izaya’s ready, this time; he was just startled before, he hadn’t properly thought through the ramifications of his action in calling Shizuo’s number and what the experience of hearing the other’s voice again would be like. He’s braced for it, now, he can surely handle himself enough to keep his mouth closed for a few minutes of silence; and he’s pushing the _Call_ button, and lifting his phone to his ear, and taking a breath as if preparing himself for a plunge underwater.

The phone rings longer, this time. Izaya wasn’t expecting that; he had had some vague expectation of Shizuo picking up right away, within the first few moments of his phone ringing like he did the first time. Maybe he doesn’t have his phone on him, Izaya thinks, maybe he won’t pick up at all; and he can feel his skin go cold with the thought, preemptive panic racing to chill all his blood with the possibility that after all this he might not hear Shizuo at all. Maybe he can wait through to the voicemail, maybe Shizuo will have recorded a greeting or even just the sound of his name to fill in some pre-determined message, maybe--and the phone clicks, the line comes alive, and “Hello?” Shizuo says, his voice so close to Izaya’s ear Izaya has to clap a hand to his mouth to stop the huff of sound that threatens his lips.

He doesn’t say anything. He was never intending to say anything; there’s too much chance Shizuo could recognize his voice, and Izaya has no explanation for why he’s calling, no reason for this absurd action even in the quiet honesty of his own head. He just waits, his hand pressing hard to his lips and his phone pressing hard to his ear, and he listens to the whisper of static on the line, and the faint background murmur of whatever is around Shizuo, and the sound of Shizuo’s breathing coming clear and steady against the receiver.

“Hello?” Shizuo’s voice is rougher, now; Izaya can imagine the crease forming in his forehead, can picture the tension drawing down at his lips as he frowns at the lack of response. “Who is this?”

Izaya doesn’t speak. He thinks he might be holding his breath, thinks his inhales may have stalled to silence in his chest; or maybe that tension is from a wholly separate cause, maybe that pressure that’s climbing his throat to choke him has its source somewhere completely different. It doesn’t matter; he’s silent in any case, whether from panic or emotion or fright, none of the causes matter so long as his hand remains pressed to his mouth and his voice remains trapped in his throat.

“Hello?” More irritation, now; Izaya can hear the edge of frustration rising under Shizuo’s voice, can picture the hunch of the other’s shoulders as his scowl deepens. “Are you going to say anything?” There’s barely a pause after the second question; Shizuo only allows enough time for himself to growl before he goes on speaking. “You called me before, didn’t you? Who gave you my number? Who _is_ this?”

Izaya’s breath is sticking in his throat; he feels like he’s going to pass out from the dizzy rush of adrenaline in his veins. Shizuo is still talking.

“Do you get off on prank calling people?” he demands, gaining traction on his own frustration as he continues speaking into Izaya’s silence. “Do you think it’s funny to piss people off? That’s a really fucked-up thing to do, laughing at someone else getting angry. I _hate_ people like you. You know stress can shorten people’s lifespans? You’re stealing _life_ by playing these stupid games.” There’s a huff of air against the receiver; the sound shudders sensation down the whole of Izaya’s spine, as if Shizuo were actually close enough for the heat of his breathing to ruffle the other’s hair. “Fuck this. I don’t have to put up with this” and there’s a rustle of sound, an electronic _beep_ so loud Izaya jumps with it, and the line goes flat with the strange lifelessness of a broken connection.

Izaya lowers the phone from his ear slowly. His hands are shaking again; but he’s braced for it, this time, he moves carefully to keep from dropping his phone to the floor. He lowers it to his lap instead, uncurls his too-tight hold from around the edges of the device; and it’s only then, once his phone is lying dark and silent in his lap, that he lifts his palm from his mouth to press the back of his hand against his eyes instead.

The damp at his lashes clings to his skin.


	3. Solitary

Izaya doesn’t hesitate over calling the next day.

He doesn’t really have a choice. He could fight with himself, sure, could push back against the bruise-ache pain at the inside of his chest and the frantic want in his thoughts and doom himself to another night of restlessness and the weight of oncoming nightmares bearing down on him; but he knows he’s going to give in, after all, and what’s the point of resisting the allure of a siren song that will inevitably pull him under? So he waits out the day, works with only half his mind on the task at hand while the other half measures every minute that passes and counts every breath that brings him closer to the afternoon and the call he can’t stop thinking about.

He waits longer, today. Two days in a row is bad enough; if he can’t make himself be patient for at least a full twenty-four hours he is truly as undone as the back of his mind suggests he already is. So he waits through the morning, focusing on the forums and chat posts and occasional phone calls he needs to keep himself connected to the goings-on of the city that presently surrounds him, and he goes to the trouble of going out for lunch, just for the extra time it takes to maneuver his wheelchair to a restaurant and himself through the stilted interaction that comes with it, and he takes the scenic route back home, turning himself down the most picturesque streets without seeing any of his surroundings at all. He’s just trying to let time pass, just trying to wait for some pre-determined indication of _enough_ in his own psyche; but his thoughts jump ahead of him, are already waiting for him back in the privacy of his silent apartment, and in the end Izaya cuts his meandering route off abruptly and takes a shortcut through a back alley to get to his apartment the faster.

He can hardly wait through the length of the elevator ride up to his room. It’s a minor inconvenience to suffer through, when he’s been deliberately inconveniencing himself all day; but the ache of want has spiked high in him now, is coursing through his veins until he would swear his hands are shaking from the adrenaline of it, and he’s run through his whole store of composure over the course of the deliberately lengthy morning. He has to tip his head back against the support of his chair in the elevator, has to consciously work himself through the process of breathing into as much patience as he has left to him; and even then the _ding_ that precedes the doors opening is enough to tense the whole length of his spine and flex painful strain into his ever-aching legs. Izaya lifts his head, and steers himself out out of the elevator and down the hallway, and he has his phone in his hand by the time he reaches the door of his apartment.

He doesn’t call immediately. He gets himself inside, first, with the weight of his door shut and locked behind him and the quiet dark of his apartment before him. His furniture is laid out with wide gaps between it, more than enough space for him to comfortably maneuver the chair that has become a necessity of his life since Ikebukuro; it’s easy to steer himself around to the couch without needing to turn on the overhead light to illuminate his way, easy to lift himself up out of his chair and onto the couch with the motion that has become uncomfortably familiar over the months since he left. The couch is soft, the cushions deep enough to sink into by inches; but Izaya doesn’t linger over the appreciation of them. He turns himself sideways instead, lets himself fall to lie flat against the support of the furniture, and then he shuts his eyes to the present and dials Shizuo’s number by memory.

There are a pair of rings before the other picks up. Izaya doesn’t feel any of his panic from the day before, or any of the cold distance from that first call; this is calm, he thinks, he can feel the adrenaline easing from his veins with every breath he takes, can feel patience spreading to fill his chest with every exhale he sets free of his lungs. There’s just the noise at his ear, the electronic hum of sound as he listens to a phone ringing miles and a lifetime away; and then the sound cuts off, there’s a crackle of brief white noise, and “Hello?” Shizuo says, and Izaya would swear he can feel his whole body go slack as if with the relief of a smoker’s first breath of nicotine.

He doesn’t answer. He has no intention of giving away his identity; this is an indulgence, not a dialogue, an appreciation that he will only ever allow himself in one direction. But Shizuo barely hesitates for an answer this time, and when he huffs an exhale it carries the shape of resignation on it more than frustration.

“It’s you again, isn’t it?” he asks. “My mystery prank caller.” There’s a pause, a shift in the sound; and then another gusting exhale, this one strangely angled compared to the first, and Shizuo again, his voice coming back into clarity as he returns the phone to his ear from looking at the number on the screen. “Hello again, I guess.”

Shizuo sounds different. He’s calmer today, Izaya guesses; maybe he had a better morning, or maybe repetition is taking the edge off of his frustration. Izaya can remember that from Ikebukuro, can remember the need for near-constant innovation on his part just to maintain the weight of Shizuo’s scowl, to keep the other’s gaze dark and crackling with interest instead of distant with boredom. He wonders if he won’t need to come up with something better than calling, wonders what else he can do to hold Shizuo’s attention when all he has to offer is a silent phone line; but Shizuo isn’t hanging up, he isn’t cutting off the sound of his voice, and when he sighs it sounds more like comfort than the anger Izaya is so familiar with.

“Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?” he asks, the question clearly rhetorical even before he goes on without waiting for the reply Izaya has no intention of giving him. “It can’t be that satisfying to call a stranger just to have them yell at you and hang up. Do you just pick numbers at random or did someone give this to you?” A pause. “Are you someone I know?” The pause is longer, this time, long enough for Izaya to actually reply if he wanted to; but he keeps his lips firmly pressed together, and after a moment Shizuo sighs again.

“It was worth asking,” he says, sounding more like he’s speaking to himself than for Izaya’s benefit. “It’s weird to think about someone actually listening to me. Or do you just call and leave the phone somewhere?” A laugh, short and sharp; Izaya’s breath catches at the sound, at the too-clear image of Shizuo’s grin that the amusement carries with it. “Guess not. That wouldn’t be any fun for you at all, unless you’re just trying to piss me off. And even then what’s the point if you can’t gloat about it?” There’s the rustle of movement, fabric shifting close by the microphone on the other end or maybe an errant gust of wind; Shizuo heaves a breath against the phone, sighing like he’s settling himself into comfort before drawing a deliberate breath that speaks as clearly to the cigarette at his lips as the huff of an exhale that follows hard on its heels.

“You’re not going to piss me off today,” he declares. Izaya can picture him perfectly: sitting on a park bench in the middle of Ikebukuro, knees angled wide to spread into the space around him, an arm angled up over the back of the bench while he braces the phone between his ear and shoulder. The image is so clear Izaya can almost feel the warmth of the sunlight on the back of his neck, can almost feel the breeze he imagines ruffling through Shizuo’s hair like idle fingers wandering through the strands. “I’m having a good day today and some stupid silent prank caller isn’t going to screw that up for me.”

 _I’m happy for you_ , Izaya wants to drawl. He wonders how long Shizuo’s calm would last if he knew who it was listening to him speak, if he knew the identity of the silent recipient of his words. But Shizuo will never pick up again if Izaya lets him know who he is, he’ll hang up immediately; and Izaya can’t breathe at just the thought of that, as if even the idea itself is enough to choke him on his own panic at this repeated loss, like some horrible fate he’s doomed to live out over and over again, saying goodbye over endless repetitions and in endless ways. So he keeps his mouth shut, and keeps his eyes closed, and lets his attention cling to the satisfaction of Shizuo’s voice at his ear, of Shizuo’s words so near to him it’s like they’re sliding directly into the space of his memory.

Shizuo takes another drag of his cigarette. If Izaya thinks about it he can call up the taste of smoke on his lips, can remember the gritty bite of nicotine in Shizuo’s mouth and under his tongue, can recall the scent clinging to Izaya’s clothes like they had borrowed the flavor of Shizuo’s the same way Izaya borrowed the heat of Shizuo’s body. He breathes out slow, careful to keep the sound inaudible to the receiver at his lips.

“This is a stupid hobby,” Shizuo declares against his ear, the weight of the words coming sharp and certain with the judgment he’s offering. “Have you ever thought about that? You’re just having fun trying to piss people off. Is it really that entertaining in the first place?” Another pause for a long inhale off his cigarette. “I don’t think it’d be very fun. Just a lot of getting yelled at, that’s not really worth it.” Shizuo goes silent again; Izaya can picture the thoughtful tilt of his head, can imagine the faraway look in his eyes as he turns over the problem in his own mind. Izaya wonders what kind of conclusion he’ll come to, wonders what sort of rationale Shizuo will find for behavior so wholly divorced from his own perspective of the world.

“I don’t get it,” Shizuo sighs finally, sounding like he’s admitting some major failing on his part. “I have no idea why you’re doing this. Are you just really lonely or something?”

Izaya’s skin goes cold. It’s like his whole body is trying to freeze itself to immobility, to lock him down in self-defense against the weight of Shizuo’s words; for the first moment he can’t speak even if he wanted to, he can barely think at all for the weight of Shizuo’s words hitting home. He just lies perfectly still across the soft of his couch, with the give of the cushions underneath him to support the boneless weight of his body; and at his ear Shizuo sighs, the weight of his exhale sounding like farewell even before he speaks.

“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe you just want to talk to someone. Maybe you’re just some asshole who thinks this is funny. Either way, I gotta go.”

 _Don’t_ , Izaya wants to say. _Stay. Keep talking_. But his voice is locked to stillness in his throat by his own need for secrecy, and all he can do is listen as Shizuo shifts on the other end of the phone, getting to his feet again to continue with whatever it is he’s doing with his day.

“Call again if you want,” he says, the invitation offhand and casual as he has never been with Izaya, as he never would be if he knew who it was listening on the other end of the line. “If you just want to listen to someone I can talk to you when I’m free. My life’s not really interesting, but maybe that’s enough for you, if you don’t have anyone else.” An inhale against the weight of a cigarette, the huff of an exhale; and then: “Bye,” and the line goes quiet, just like that, with no more warning that that brief farewell.

Izaya lies still for a long moment, his phone still pressed to his ear, his eyes open and staring unseeing at the ceiling of his apartment. He’s afraid to move, afraid almost to breathe, as if the least shift will give him away to Shizuo miles and months away from him, as if the connection between them hasn’t fallen flat and dead by Shizuo’s own hand. It’s almost a full minute before he can muster the nerve to lift the phone up so he can see it, so he can tap against the dark glass and light up the home screen as proof of the ended call, as evidence enough to ease the painful tension in his body with reassurance of his own isolation again. He reaches out sideways, sets his phone on the coffee table alongside the couch without looking; and then he shuts his eyes, and lifts his arm to weight over his face, and lets his touch slide down against the clinging soft of his shirt against his chest.

It’s uncanny, to have the echo of Shizuo’s voice so near at his ear. It’s as if Izaya had him here for a brief moment, as if he had managed to rewind the mistakes and losses of his life to the past, to materialize himself back into the city he dreams of and tries not to remember except in those brief flares of unconscious desire, the ones that turn into painful nostalgia as often as they reform to nightmares. There’s too much he left behind him to make visiting comfortable, even in his imagination; it’s like trying to force himself into a childhood home long outgrown, when the gaps between recollection and reality only serve to highlight the changes that have happened in himself. But he’s been pulled in, now, drawn backwards in time to the gold lighting of memories years distant, to the grate of Shizuo’s voice in his ear and the thought of Shizuo’s hands on his body, and all he can do is surrender, is gasp for air to fill his trembling lungs and shut his eyes to the force of reality and let memory as much fantasy as reality pull him under into what catharsis physical pleasure can grant.

It’s Shizuo’s hands Izaya remembers best. The crush of his mouth, the blunt edges of his teeth, the flex of his thighs; those are all important, details to flesh out Izaya’s imagination with the breathless accuracy of reality. But his hands: the strength in his fingers digging in against Izaya’s ribcage, the heat that always radiated off his palms as if from a sun glowing within his veins, the texture of his fingerprints bearing down on Izaya as if to seep past his skin and leave their mark on the very core of the other’s psyche. Shizuo could pick him up without trying and often did, Izaya remembers, pressing his grip against the line of Izaya’s waist or seizing underneath one of the other’s legs to push him up against the support of a shadowed alley wall, or into the glass of one of Izaya’s apartment windows, or back over the tangled sheets of Shizuo’s bed. Rough, hurried, almost frantic pressure; and Izaya can feel himself tremble with the memory of it, can feel his breath heating to steam as if the sound of Shizuo’s voice at his ear was enough all alone to reawaken the flames dampened to dying coals inside his chest. He reaches down for one leg, gritting his teeth against the pain of motion that comes with pulling it up towards his chest so he can let his foot fall over the back of the couch; but the strain against the inside of his thigh is familiar, the ache of it enough to hiss desire past his teeth as he drops his hand to push at the fastenings at the front of his jeans instead. His hand is shaking, with desperation or pain or adrenaline he doesn’t know which, but he doesn’t think of stopping; there’s no choice for him, like this, no sense of agency in this action. This is instinctive, involuntary, as much Shizuo’s inadvertent doing as Izaya’s own; he has no other choice, not with his whole body trembling on the tension of Shizuo’s voice so calm and so close against his ear. He gets his jeans open, pushes the weight of the fabric down to free the heat of his cock from the restraint; and then he curls his hand around himself, and tips his head back against the cushions, and lets himself fall backwards into the relief of illusion.

He can picture Shizuo here. The ache in his upraised leg is sharp, brighter than it ever used to be in Ikebukuro; but it doesn’t matter, it’s not enough to distract, not when Izaya is imagining the heat of Shizuo’s breathing rushing fast over him and the drag of Shizuo’s hands pulling with rough desperation against his clothes. He still has his jeans loose around his hips, still has the burden of clothing constricting his movement; but in his head Shizuo is stripping the weight of the denim down and off his legs, growling that low note of want far in the back of his throat like he does whenever desire spikes too high to allow for coherency. Izaya imagines reaching out with his free hand, imagines grinding the heel of his palm hard against the taut front of Shizuo’s slacks; and Shizuo growling, hissing frustration as he seizes Izaya’s wrist in a bruising grip, as he shoves the other’s hand up to strain over his head.

Izaya lets the arm over his face slide up, reaches to curl his fingers into a fist against the edge of the cushion over his head; but his eyes are still shut, the reality of his surroundings is lost to the image of Shizuo over him, Shizuo’s hands pushing at his knees and Shizuo’s hips fitting against his thighs and Shizuo pushing hard against him, Shizuo’s voice slipping into that low groan of relief that always tears from him with the first thrust of his cock into Izaya’s body. Izaya’s hips come up, his spine curving to arch him off the support of the couch until his legs shake with it, until he can feel the pain of the action coalescing to the edge of agony in the whole of his body; but reality is unimportant, right now, with the echo of Shizuo’s voice in his ears to lend his fantasy brief credibility. In reality Izaya’s own hand is stroking rough over his cock, his hips are bucking up to meet the frantic pace of his motion; but in his head it’s Shizuo moving into him that is jolting through his body, Shizuo’s rough actions that are straining him towards the edge of pleasure. Izaya is panting, his breath catching tight in his chest until it comes out as a whimper past his throat; but he’s hearing Shizuo, the rush of his breathing, the low thrum of half-stifled groans with every forward motion, the resonance of his voice as pleasure drops low in his chest, as his usual growling frustration goes hot and dark with want. Izaya can almost track the rise of the other’s pleasure in the rhythm of his breathing, in the raw edge on the inhales he gasps into Izaya’s hair as he pushes closer, as his fingers tighten against the inside of Izaya’s knee; and Izaya’s spine arches, his legs flex, his whole body clenches tight through the long shudder of orgasm that hits him. He closes his mouth hard on the whimper of sound in his throat, stifles the familiar plea of _Shizu-chan_ into a hiss past gritted teeth instead; but the shape of the name remains, lingering at the back of his throat like the heat of alcohol swallowed too fast, there even when he trusts himself enough to open his mouth and pant for air to ease the racing rhythm of his heartbeat.

He lies still for long minutes, after, while the wet against his fingers dries to tacky discomfort and the ache against the inside of his thigh settles into the promise of a cramp to suffer through later today or in the dark hours of the night. Finally Izaya lets his hold on himself go, reaching instead to steady his leg as he lowers it back to the cushions beneath him; the motion steals his breath with the pain of it, knocks his mind blank of anything but hurt for a moment, but that’s a relief of its own, that moment of peace from the shadows of his own mind. By the time he’s gasped himself back to awareness his eyes are open, his gaze fixed on the ceiling overhead, and there’s only the ache at his thigh and the mess across his stomach to speak to the most recent of his myriad mistakes.

Izaya knows he ought to feel guilty, ought to feel regret. Certainly he’s done himself no favors, either by unearthing the memories he’s spent months burying in too-shallow graves or by pushing his damaged body so hard in pursuit of too-brief pleasure. This is as much self-destruction as it is indulgence, satisfaction formed in agony as much as relief. But he’s already thinking about tomorrow, already measuring the hours until he can get away with calling again, and he has no intention of even trying to stop himself.

He’d do anything at all, he thinks, to feel a little less alone.


	4. Peaceful

Izaya doesn’t call again until the evening.

It’s easier to wait, now. He has some sense of what reception he will be met with; not the abrupt panic of his first call, nor the sharp-edged rejection from Shizuo of the second. _I can talk to you when I’m free_ , Shizuo had said, and so Izaya waits: through the early hours of the morning, when productivity grows with the increasing illumination of the daylight, and the long warmth of the afternoon, when Shizuo will be out in the city at work or eating lunch with Celty, or Tom, or Kadota. Izaya’s been gone for six months but his knowledge lingers, the weight of observation collected over the span of a decade still clings to his mind and rises for his consideration the moment he reaches to unearth it from his past. This is when Shizuo likes to stop for the hour break from intimidating and sometimes actually punching people; this is when his energy flags, as the sun sinks towards the horizon, when Izaya could draw closer than at other times due to Shizuo’s worn-out distraction. This is the best time for a fight, as the sunset is flaring crimson out across the city sky and Shizuo’s temper is worn thin by a full day of more-or-less restraint; and this is the best time to interrupt him at dinner, to make directly for the front door of his apartment rather than wandering the city streets. Shizuo will be at home, now, Izaya thinks as he watches the sun slide below the horizon, as he watches the light of day fade into the deep purples and blues of falling night; this is when Izaya would leave Shinjuku, on those days when his blood ran shivery with heat in his veins, when the electricity along his spine demanded lengthier satisfaction than rushed friction and gasping breaths in a secluded alley. By the time he was climbing the stairs to Shizuo’s apartment the other would be finishing dinner, would be just settling into what he expected to be a peaceful evening before dropped heavy-limbed and warm into bed; and Izaya reaches for his phone instead of for the handle of Shizuo’s door, and dials a number instead of turning a knob.

Shizuo answers immediately. There’s barely half of the first ring before the line clicks into life, before the huff of breath on the other end speaks to the presence of an audience for Izaya’s determined silence. “Hello?” he says, the word coming fast on the force of rote repetition; but then, immediately, without waiting for an answer: “Do you feel like talking today?” with an upswing at the end of something like curiosity, something very nearly hope. Izaya keeps his lips pressed tight together, stares unseeing at the velvety dark of the night falling on the other side of his apartment window; and at his ear Shizuo sighs, heaving a breath that sounds like resignation more than irritation.

“Okay,” he says. “I don’t mind. Guess I’m kind of used to talking to myself anyway. I’ve got a friend who’s real quiet too.” He huffs a laugh; Izaya can hear him shift, can hear the rustle of his habitual uniform moving as he leans back into greater comfort. “I think I must drive her crazy, sometimes, talking as much as I do. She’s really patient though, it’s great. I don’t know how she puts up with the world without losing her temper, things that drive me crazy just seem to roll right off her. And she’s always willing to let me talk. It’s good to have someone who’s just willing to listen, you know?” There’s a pause, a beat of silence like Shizuo just realized what he said; and then another laugh, this one a little rougher and more self-deprecating. “For me, at least. You don’t seem to want to talk much at all. Are you always quiet like this or is it just with me?” Another rustle of movement; Izaya thinks that might be Shizuo kicking his legs out in front of him, stretching the whole long line of them out across the narrow span of his apartment floor. Izaya can feel pressure in his chest as if he’s caught between the wall and the weight of Shizuo’s palm against his heart.

“I don’t mind,” Shizuo says again, sounding sincere, sounding unconcerned. Izaya’s never heard him sound like that before. Izaya wonders if he always sounds like this with other people, with Celty, with Tom, with people not-Izaya. “Like I said. My life’s not really interesting but maybe you like listening to other people. Sort of like people-watching but over the phone. Do you call other people like this? Does anyone else ever talk to you about their day or do they just get bored and hang up on you?” There’s a pause, a breath of hesitation; and then another laugh, this time low and rumbling deep in the depths of Shizuo’s chest. Izaya can feel the sound shudder through the whole of his body, like his blood is thrumming in resonance with that note.

“I dunno why I keep asking you questions,” Shizuo admits. “You don’t want to talk and I keep acting like you’re going to. Sorry.” He sighs an exhale, shifting through some unknown motion while Izaya’s pulse skips over the sound of _sorry_ in Shizuo’s voice, over the easy sincerity of that apology at his ear. “It’s habit, I guess. I do it to Celty too, but she answers sometimes on her phone.” Shizuo makes an apologetic sound around some obstruction at his mouth; a cigarette, Izaya assumes. “She texts answers, I mean. Celty’s my friend, the one who listens to me babble when I need someone to talk to.” There’s the _click_ of a lighter crackling alight on the other end of the line, the deliberate force of an inhale drawn to pull flame into the thin give of paper; Shizuo sighs an exhale against the receiver.

“I’m not really good at telling stories,” he says, sounding more thoughtful about this statement than apologetic. “I guess if you don’t ask questions that doesn’t matter anyway, but it might be confusing to just listen to me ramble. Not that I guess you’ll tell me if you mind. Will you just hang up if you get bored?” He pauses again, to take an inhale off his cigarette rather than to wait for an answer; Izaya can almost taste smoke in the air when Shizuo sighs through the breath. “I guess I’ll find out, anyway. There’s really nothing very interesting about my life, you know. I like things to be peaceful.”

 _I know_ , Izaya doesn’t say. _Are they now, without me there?_ He keeps his mouth shut and keeps his gaze fixed on the darkening sky outside. Night is deepening on the other side of the glass; with the moon not yet risen Izaya can pick out the faint specks of the brightest stars, even with the illumination of the city to wash them out.

“I just went to work today,” Shizuo continues, speaking with idle attention, like he’s listening to the sound of his own voice as much as for the possibility of an answer on the other end of the phone line. “I work with this guy Tom. He was my senpai in middle school, was always really patient with me then.” Another inhale off his cigarette, another lingering exhale. “He’s pretty nice to me now, too. I screw things up a lot but he still lets me keep working for him. It’s better than the last place I worked at. I got fired a couple times before I got this job.”

I _got you fired_. Izaya can remember the first day Shizuo started his work at the bar, the short-lived assignment that gave him the uniform he still clings to with such dedication; Izaya had stopped in the shadows of the doorway while Shizuo’s back was turned, had stared at the fit of crisp white across the span of Shizuo’s shoulders and the tension of the dark vest against the lean curve of the other’s waist. He’s still grateful to Kasuka for the gift that kept Shizuo in that uniform even after Izaya got Shizuo kicked out of the job itself.

“That was years ago though,” Shizuo says. “I’ve been working for Tom for a while now. It’s pretty easy, mostly I just go with him around the city while he talks to customers.” He pauses, punctuates with a faint noise of frustration. “He’s a debt collector. Probably should have mentioned that at the start. He goes around to tell people when they have to pay up. Not the greatest of work, but it pays the bills and Tom’s pretty nice when I screw up.” There’s another hesitation, longer this time, like Shizuo’s not quite sure what to say. “I don’t screw up as much recently.”

Izaya can feel the force of Shizuo’s words strain down his spine and tense in his jaw. Shizuo has no idea who he’s talking to, Shizuo thinks he’s speaking to a complete stranger with no knowledge of him or Ikebukuro either one; but Izaya knows why Shizuo’s temper has been more manageable lately, he can feel the responsibility for that curl his fingers in against his palm resting at the arm of his wheelchair. He has a brief, dizzy moment of wondering if Shizuo is going to mention him, if Shizuo will bring up the absence of his old nemesis; he wonders if he can stand to listen to Shizuo describe him as if to a stranger, if he can bear to know the way Shizuo would frame the bite and friction of their relationship to someone else. But there’s just a pause, a gap for everything Shizuo might say to go unvoiced, and when Shizuo takes a breath Izaya can feel the flicker of disappointment shiver across his skin even before the other goes on speaking.

“That’s work, anyway. And then I ran into Celty after and stopped to chat for a bit. She’s always out and about in the city, I usually see her once or twice in a day even if we don’t plan to meet up. We almost went to get sushi but she had to get back home to her roommate. That’s Shinra, I’ve known him since elementary school.” Shizuo pauses to take another inhale from his cigarette, exhales slowly; it sounds thoughtful, even before the necessary pause goes long on consideration. “I dunno what to think about Shinra. He’s a little irritating to be around, I think; but Celty seems to like him, at least, so it’s all the same to me, as long as she’s happy with him.” A huff of a laugh, low and purring. “That sounds a little like I’m in love with her, huh. It’s not like that with Celty, though. I just don’t know if Shinra’s actually a good person or not.” Shizuo sighs, resignation layering itself to weight at the back of his tongue. “Well, I can always punch him if Celty wants me to. Or she can. She’s definitely able to take care of herself.” Another laugh, softer this time, a chuckle bubbling up from the depths of Shizuo’s chest. Izaya can feel the vibration hum to warmth through the whole of his body, as if Shizuo’s laughter is the glow of a fire to heat ice-numbed flesh towards something like life again. “‘Course, if it’s her Shinra would probably enjoy anything she did.”

Izaya wants to laugh. The urge is bitter on his tongue, weighting at the back of his throat like it has a physical presence; it’s hard to stay quiet, to listen to Shizuo talking about people Izaya knows as if they’re strangers, as if Izaya doesn’t know exactly how infatuated Shinra is with anything Celty does or how critical Tom’s acceptance is to Shizuo’s continued employment in a city otherwise terrified of him. Every clarification Shizuo offers is like an ache in an open wound, like pain grinding through Izaya’s thoughts to remind him that Shizuo doesn’t know it’s him, that Shizuo doesn’t suspect who his audience is, that the friendliness and calm he’s offering isn’t for Izaya, that Izaya would never be hearing this at all if Shizuo knew who it was sitting silently on the other end of the line; and maybe it’s not laughter tangling itself against the inside of Izaya’s chest, after all.

Shizuo heaves a sigh on the other end of the line, as oblivious to the weight of Izaya’s thoughts as he is to the truth of the other’s identity. “I don’t really have anything worth talking about,” he says, almost in the tone of an apology, as if the sound of his voice alone isn’t a drug, as if the thrill of hearing familiar names at his lips isn’t an addiction Izaya is too weak to resist. “Not that I’m complaining. I like things better this way, when I can just live my life without getting into fights every day.” There’s a pause, a moment for Shizuo to linger over the implication of those words; Izaya shuts his eyes to the faint glow of the stars, closes his free hand at the arm of his chair in a futile attempt to brace himself for what he knows is coming.

“I should probably go,” Shizuo says. “I’m just going to watch some television and go to bed, that won’t be any fun for you at all.” Izaya wants to protest, aware even as he thinks it how keenly it speaks to his desperation, that he’d sit in silence for hours just to hear the sound of Shizuo breathing; but of course he gave up his voice in exchange for this indulgence, and all he can do is listen to Shizuo shift as he takes another inhale from his cigarette. “I hope you don’t mind me rambling. I guess if you do you won’t call back, huh? Are you even still listening to me now?” There’s a rustle of movement, presumably as Shizuo draws the phone away to consider the display; and a huff of surprise as he brings it back to his ear. “Huh. Well, whatever. It doesn’t make a difference to me, I guess. Kinda nice to just talk to someone, even if you don’t say anything.” Shizuo sighs against the receiver, the sound so weighted with conclusion it’s almost a groan in the back of his throat. “Anyway. I guess I’ll talk to you tomorrow, if you call again. See ya.” And he’s gone, the line falling to silence while Izaya’s breath is still catching on the déjà vu of that casual farewell, as if Shizuo has thrown him bodily into the shadows of the past. For a moment Izaya can’t breathe at all, can’t fill his lungs with oxygen or smooth the tangle of his thoughts; and then he struggles through an inhale, feeling the effort burn in his lungs as if the air is layered with smoke, and when he forces out a reply it’s raw in the back of his throat, so faint and shaky he doesn’t think Shizuo would recognize his voice even if the other were still listening.

“Yeah.” Izaya opens his eyes; outside true night has fallen, the color of the sky has bled itself to the black that comes in the gap between the loss of the sun and the rise of the moon. “See you, Shizu-chan.”


	5. Spill

It becomes habit, after that.

Izaya is alarmed by how rapidly a single indulgence has become a part of his evening routine; or rather, he would be, if he spared himself the leeway to think about what he’s doing at all. But he knows better than to think he can restrain himself from calling after listening to Shizuo ramble about the city -- _his_ city -- for long minutes, and if it hurts to hear about the life he left behind him Izaya craves it still, like all the want he’d been so valiantly repressing for the last months has only been building up behind a dam to sweep over everything he’s tried to make of himself in the time since he left. He thinks of nothing else, _enjoys_ nothing else; there’s only the sound of Shizuo’s voice, the developing routine of the evening calls, and the gaps of necessary time from one to the next that he must cross one way or another. One day he keeps himself overly busy, multi-tasking through the hours until he’s exhausted by the time he dials Shizuo’s number; the next he lingers long over everything he does, losing himself into an almost meditative trance with every action until the hours have slipped past without pain, if not without note. It makes no real difference; in the end his attention is on the evening, on the pattern of Shizuo’s phone number and the anticipation of the ringtone at his ear and, every night: “Hey, feel like talking?” before Shizuo sighs resignation and launches into his latest story.

His days are uninteresting. Izaya can tell that objectively; Shizuo skims over the fistfights that stand out as the most interesting part of his work day, and with the absence of anyone to fan the heat of his anger he’s apparently fallen into a pacifism that would make Simon proud. The idea twists Izaya’s stomach, prickles nauseating discomfort through him that curls his fingers in against his palms and hunches his shoulders over his body; but he can’t stop calling, can’t stop listening to anything Shizuo is willing to give him, to anything he can get. Incoherent descriptions of people Izaya already knows, repetitive renditions of days so alike to one another Izaya thinks he could predict Shizuo’s recitation before the other has even given it, boring trivialities of a life closer to ordinary than anyone like Shizuo should be confined to; and Izaya listens to it all, hanging on every word as if each one might offer him the lifeline to follow back to the existence he left behind him. He stays on the phone as long as Shizuo will let him, letting minutes accumulate into hours on those nights Shizuo is feeling generous, or patient, or perhaps sympathetic; and even that thought, that he might be feeding off the other’s sense of pity for the silent stranger on the other end of the phone line, isn’t enough to spike his pride into cutting himself off from the contact.

Tonight is a good night. It’s been just over a week since that first too-brief call; Izaya knows, now, how to handle himself, knows how to settle himself across his couch with his feet propped up on one end to keep them from aching or going numb and knows to keep a glass of water in close reach in the event Shizuo decides to talk for the hours he indulged in two days before. Izaya’s had a good day; the anticipation was a pleasure today rather than a burden, the stress of uncertainty eased enough with repetition to let him count on the call rather than worry over whether Shizuo would pick up or not. He’s comfortable, settled in against his couch and with his phone fully charged and ready in his hand; and when he dials the number by memory he doesn’t even realize that there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Shizuo picks up right away. “Hello,” he says, polite greeting as brief as it is unnecessary. “Still not going to talk today?” Izaya doesn’t answer and Shizuo doesn’t wait for a reply; he’s breathing the weight of an exhale against the phone, the sound a tell for him settling himself into comfort as much as the faint rustle of motion Izaya can hear through the receiver. “Is it that you can’t talk or that you won’t? I guess it’d be kind of weird to call people if you can’t answer them at all but it’s kind of weird to stay quiet if you can. Do you really like hearing my voice that much?” That comes with a laugh, like the idea is so patently absurd Shizuo can’t even muster the composure to finish voicing it; Izaya’s skin prickles with the sense of a blow nearly missed, as if it were a punch skimming within a hair’s-breadth of his skin instead of a guess glancing against the fringes of his emotional defenses.

“Whatever,” Shizuo continues, dismissing his inadvertently accurate guess with the simple gust of an exhale. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t even mind that much anymore, you know?” This fact is obvious -- the last several days of one-sided conversation stand as a testament to it -- but Izaya doesn’t comment, doesn’t even think about opening his lips to so much as breathe an exhale. Better to keep his mouth shut, to hold back the possibility of speech from Shizuo’s too-clear hearing; Izaya can only continue this indulgence if he keeps himself quiet, and he can’t imagine going without the lull of Shizuo’s voice at his ear to urge him towards the relief of dreamless sleep he’s been managing lately. He’d do anything at all to keep this, now, even knowing how desperate he is, even knowing how much it speaks to his pathetic need; as long as Shizuo doesn’t know it’s him, as long as he has no audience, there’s no one to know about the telltale weakness of his still-aching heart.

“I almost like it,” Shizuo says, sounding contemplative on the other end of the line. “I keep thinking about it during the day, what kinds of things I might have to tell you about, or if something will make a good story. Not that I know what you like, I guess, but it’s nice to think about. It gives me something to distract myself while I’m on the train or buying dinner.” There’s a pause, one of the thoughtful ones that linger so long Izaya can imagine Shizuo’s frown, can imagine the considering set of his lips against the weight of his usual cigarette; maybe he’s playing with his sunglasses, or working at the buttons at the cuffs of his shirt with that habit he has that so often leaves his uniform looking more disheveled than otherwise. It’s a foolish thing, the bored movement more suited to a child than the adult he is; and Izaya is hit with such a wave of nostalgia he would swear his breathing stalls for a moment under the pressure of it. It’s like he can see the flutter of white fabric in the breeze, like he’s watching Shizuo’s fingers slide back and through bleached-blond hair turned to gold by summer sunlight; and he shuts his eyes, and tips his head back, and lifts his arm to angle across his face. He has no audience, there’s no one to see the burn he can feel starting to collect behind his lids and against the weight of his lashes; but it’s easier, this way, to pretend he’s not feeling it either, easier to distance his awareness from himself so he can ignore the threat of tears as they form to a knot in his throat and the inside of his chest.

“Nothing really happened today,” Shizuo says against the phone, his voice still clear and wholly oblivious to the wave of homesickness that the simple rustle of his movement has elicited from Izaya. “Just work, as usual. Everyone was pretty good today; there were a few idiots, like always, but I didn’t have to get into any fights. I hate violence,” he says, the tacked-on addendum that would seem so reasonable to a stranger and is the height of absurdity for anyone who knows him; the tension in Izaya’s throat shifts, trying to set free the huff of a laugh around the wet heat still pressing behind his eyes.

“Celty and Shinra are gone too,” Shizuo goes on, as oblivious to Izaya’s emotion as ever, his comprehension stalled out permanently by the silence that is all Izaya will let himself give back as response. “Vacation. Did I tell you about that?” He hasn’t, but Izaya doesn’t protest this oversight, and Shizuo is continuing on without waiting. “It’s supposed to be for something like six weeks. It’s a long time but I guess Celty hasn’t really been on a vacation before, and Shinra decided he wanted to show her what she was missing.” Shizuo huffs the vocal equivalent of a shrug against the phone. “I hope they’re having a good time. Celty texted me a little the first day they left, but they have real bad cell service where they are so it’s been pretty quiet from either of them.”

There’s a pause. Izaya has to brace himself for these, for the weight of silence that forms itself in the gap of quiet on the phone line while he listens to Shizuo working through some thought in his head; the silence carries a strange kind of intimacy, as if without the distraction of speech Izaya can fit himself inside the outline of Shizuo’s very thoughts, as if they might be able to come to some kind of an understanding between them if they both stay still for long enough. It makes Izaya feel dizzy, like he’s standing on a ledge and experiencing the vertigo that has never once been a part of his life, as if the communion of calm coexistence is enough to knock free all the self-confidence that has held him together through so much more physical danger. Right now, with his heart already thudding hard against the inside of his chest and his throat already tight with emotion, it’s almost unbearable, as if Shizuo is in the room with him and has the full weight of his open palm crushing down against Izaya’s chest to shove him flat to the give of the couch under him. Izaya has to set his jaw to keep forcing the effort of his breathing to silence, has to focus the whole of his attention to working through the rhythm of his inhales to keep them from jarring into unrestrained panic; and then Shizuo sighs an exhale, and Izaya’s breathing spills from him in a rush of relief so intense it’s nearly painful.

“It’s been quiet in general,” Shizuo says, thoughtfully, the way he always sounds when he makes this claim. “I know it’s probably pretty boring to hear about but it’s weird to have everything be so calm. I used to get into a lot of fights, back when…” He cuts himself off, his words giving way like they’re dropping off that same cliff Izaya feels like he’s standing on; when he speaks again it’s with an entirely different trajectory, so obviously pulling away from a sensitive subject Izaya would laugh at how much of a giveaway it is if he couldn’t hear his own name in the shadows of what Shizuo isn’t speaking aloud.

Shizuo clears his throat. “I used to fight a lot.” The period at the end of the sentence is like a wall denying Izaya’s existence, like the city limits of Ikebukuro inscribing around the past to leave Shizuo on one side and Izaya on the other. “But I don’t like it, like I said. So it’s really nice to have things be quiet. They never used to be like this.”

Izaya presses harder against his face, weighting against the tension he can feel in his expression with his fingertips like he can press it out of existence, like he can catch the impossible burden of his emotions against his palm and tighten his grip around them until they give way entirely, until they fragment to dust along with the endless bittersweet of the past. This isn’t what he wanted, this blossoming emotion spreading out like a poisonous flower against the inside of his chest, feeding on Shizuo’s words instead of on the sunshine and water of a more wholesome existence; but he can’t hang up, even as he knows he should, can’t pull away from the bone-deep bruise Shizuo’s voice is leaving on his psyche. It will only be worse if he turns off the phone now, only be worse without anything at all but the silence of his surroundings and the shadows of his own thoughts to soothe him; so he presses the back of his hand against the hot tears threatening his eyes, and breathes as deliberately and calmly as he can, and he waits for Shizuo to change the subject himself.

He doesn’t have to wait long. Shizuo huffs against the receiver, a sound like he’s shaking himself free of those bonds of the past with the same easy strength he claims to so hate and so casually demonstrates every moment of his existence, and when he goes on speaking it’s with deliberate cheer in his tone, with his intention to change the subject audible on every syllable.

“I went out for dinner tonight,” he says, volunteering information as if he’s talking to a friend, or a relative, as if he’s a college student calling home and trying to reassure his mother that he’s eating well after moving out. The idea makes Izaya smile, even if the expression is shaky against the tremor of emotion at his mouth, and if his eyes are still burning at least his shoulders are easing a little bit, at least his breathing is coming a little more calmly in his chest. He’s relaxing back against the couch under him, his body going slack with the weight of relief as Shizuo continues down a topic blessedly free of nostalgic pain. “I know it’s healthier to cook for yourself but it takes so much time, you know? Sometimes I go over to a friend’s house but Celty’s not a very good cook yet, even if she is taking lessons, and Kadota works nights so he only has people over when he’s got the day off. At least going out is probably better than the convenience store, right?” He huffs a laugh by way of self-deprecating response to his own question; the sound purrs down the line and against the length of Izaya’s spine without so much as hesitating in jumping from electronics to flesh. “It’s alright, though. Russia Sushi has pretty good food anyway.”

Izaya doesn’t feel the tension rising in his throat. It’s too immediate, too much of a reflexive reaction to the sound of Shizuo’s words; with his stress ebbing and his thoughts wandering the blow of the restaurant name slams right past all his defenses to send him reeling back in time over nearly a decade at once, his life flashing in a rush as his memory rewinds itself back to the distant haze of high school, of cherry blossoms on the pavement and Shizuo’s scowl tipping in close to his own. The first time Simon caught up with them in the middle of a fight Izaya had been more irritated than grateful; but the argument over a meal felt more like the structure of a date than anything else, and Izaya hadn’t even been surprised by after, when they obeyed Simon’s order to ‘find something better to do than fight’ by making out behind the restaurant so roughly that it left Shizuo with a bloody lip, and Izaya with a black eye, and the both of them with heat enough to serve them for a week’s worth of fantasies. Izaya can call up every detail of the shadowed alley, from the squeak of the door that always announced visitors before their appearance to the flickering streetlight that cast Shizuo’s breathless smile into the yellow haze of true gold, and in the first moment of full-impact yearning his breath rushes out of him, his throat tenses around the pressure, and he whimpers something horribly close to a sob against the phone.

Izaya’s whole body goes cold at exactly the same time Shizuo cuts himself off to absolute silence. His eyes are open under the cover of his hand, his heart is racing itself to panic in his chest; but he doesn’t take a breath, doesn’t move so much as a muscle as he waits. There’s nothing to hear from the phone at his ear, no sound at all but the roaring of his heart pounding in his ears; and for a brief, stricken moment Izaya finds it in him to pray, to beg, to hope with every desperate shred of the optimism he’s never had that he’ll go unrecognized. It was just one sound, it was just an exhale; even if Shizuo heard him he would have heard a breath, a single, cut-off noise surely too brief for him to identify the tone. There’s no way he could have known who it was, Izaya tells himself with desperate speed, no way he could have...and Shizuo takes a breath, and Izaya can hear doom in the sound even before the other speaks.

“ _Izaya_?”

Izaya jerks the phone away from his ear, reaching to stab at the screen with shaking fingers before he can think. He misses his first attempt, turns the call to speakerphone for a moment; there’s a crackle of noise, the sound of Shizuo’s breathing dragging loud to fill the whole of Izaya’s world for a heartbeat, and then he lands his touch at the _End_ button and cuts off the sound and the call at once. That’s enough to turn off the microphone and the threat it offers of spilling Izaya’s voice across the distance to Shizuo’s ears; but Izaya is fumbling to turn the phone over and sit up at one and the same time, shoving himself up from the couch as he digs his fingernails in underneath the protective casing on his phone to wrench it free. He pulls too hard as the plastic comes loose, enough to send his phone toppling out of his hands and to the floor; and he throws himself after it, falling off the couch and slamming his shoulder against the edge of the coffee table as he grabs for the fallen device. The glass of water against the surface tips over, spilling a flood of liquid across the table and trickling over the edge to soak into Izaya’s sleeve, but he doesn’t reach to right it and doesn’t make any attempt to stop the spill before it runs over the edge to splash to the floor. He’s entirely focused on the phone in his grip, and the plastic frame coming open under his desperate hold; and then he has the back off, and he’s wrenching the battery free of the case, and the screen goes instantly dark against his palm.

Izaya doesn’t move for a minute. His sleeve is going wet as the water from his spilled drink soaks into the cloth and clings clammy to his skin, and his legs are sending shooting jolts of pain through the whole of his body at his abrupt motion over the edge of the couch; his arm is bruised from the table, his fingertips are stinging from his too-hasty drag over the cell phone case, his breathing is rattling on adrenaline in his chest with every inhale he takes. But his phone is silent in his hands, deprived of even the possibility of power and certainly of the danger of a return phone call; and when Izaya moves it’s to tip himself forward, to let his forehead press hard against the edge of the table, and to shut his eyes against the anguish of regret that only ever finds him too late.


	6. Residual

It’s a week before Izaya can make himself call back.

The time is not kind to him. He sleeps not at all the first night; after he manages to drop his phone to the floor and struggle himself through the process of cleaning up the spilled water from his overturned glass he locks himself in the bathroom and runs the shower so long he even uses up the apartment’s outrageous supply of hot water. The lock is pointless -- he lives alone, and the deadbolt on the front door is more than enough to ensure his privacy -- but it’s reassuring to feel like he’s blocking off the rest of the world, like he’s narrowing his whole existence to just the span of the four walls of the bathroom and the steam-hazed air that struggles so hard in his lungs when he breathes. There’s no internet here, no cell phones, no Ikebukuro and no Shizuo; just the sound of the water splashing on the tile and trickling across his hunched shoulders to leave trails of overheated red across his skin, and the effort of his breathing on each lungful of air he manages, and the white noise surrounding him enough to drown out the hammer of his heartbeat and the catch of his breathing.

He unlocks the door eventually, when he’s so lightheaded with heat he thinks he might pass out on the tile floor of the bathroom with no one to find him; but even then it’s only to pull on the clothes he left in a heap by the door, and to make his way to his bedroom to lie across the sheets of his bed and stare at the wall of the room without really seeing it. He doesn’t sleep, and he doesn’t dream; but it makes as little difference, when his vision is hazed over with memories of the past crumbling as fast as he calls them up, disintegrating along with the brief indulgence of Shizuo’s voice that he let himself have for too long. It would be easier if he had stopped sooner, if he had suffered through the want after that first call and let Shizuo’s number go undialed; but now he has too much, he has a week’s worth of a routine torn away from him and the memory of Shizuo’s voice shocked out of any emotion other than surprise on the name he’d been so meticulously avoiding, and now there’s no way to turn away from the crushing weight of the loneliness.

Izaya doesn’t know how long he stays there. He drifts through too-vivid memories interlaced with vicious self-condemnation, stares unblinking at the wall and then tells himself it’s the burn of dry eyes pulling tears from him instead of the misery that seems to have replaced all the inner workings of his chest. Everything feels unfamiliar again, like it’s the first day after he left all over, with his body broken and bruised from the last touch Shizuo let him feel and the whole of his life contorted into something he doesn’t recognize and can’t understand, as if he’s a plant torn from the soil he had made his own and carried halfway across the world to something rocky and unwelcoming. Except Ikebukuro was never welcoming, he reminds himself, Ikebukuro was never gentle; and he’s not strong enough for that, now, not with his facade cracked beyond repair, not when even months of effort to compose himself give way to a single impulsive urge for connection. This was a mistake, all of this was a mistake; Izaya tells himself that through the long span of the night, and into the expanse of the next day, until finally exhaustion sweeps over his misery and drags him down into the dreamless sleep that is only a relief for the temporary oblivion it brings.

The world is easier, when he awakes. Not better, perhaps, not brighter; but it’s easier to calm himself, easier to catch his breath when it starts to fracture around the panic of remembering Shizuo’s voice resonant with that first surge of awareness. It doesn’t matter if Shizuo knew it was him, it doesn’t matter how furious Shizuo may be at the revelation; Izaya’s phone is still on the floor where he left it, battery separated from electronics by the span of inches, and Shizuo has no lead to go on, no way to track Izaya down based on a single phone number and the sound of a brief inhale. Izaya is careful with his phones, he knows better than to leave any means of tracking him associated to any of his various numbers; and it’s hardly like it matters anyway. Shizuo might be calmer but that doesn’t make him any more clever; he wouldn’t know how to pin Izaya down even with far more of a lead than Izaya has ever given him. Without the surrender of Izaya turning his phone back on Shizuo has no way to find him, no way to contact him; Izaya can keep his distance, can work back through the agonizing process of rebuilding his life in the present instead of in the past, and if it’s repeating work he’s already done over the last months that’s his own burden to bear, his own fault for capitulating to such a stupid desire in the first place. It will get better, he tells himself with as much firmness as he can bring to bear; it’s just one interaction, it’s just one phone call. He can leave this behind him as cleanly as he left Ikebukuro.

He cannot.

He doesn’t know what makes the difference. Is it that he gave up a sacrifice of blood, the first time, as payment for his freedom? Is it that he crossed the boundaries of the city still shocked breathless with retaining the life he had been so willing to give away and the fresh eyes that come with a near-death experience? Is it the fact that Shizuo was the one who walked away, last time, and that now Izaya wakes gasping from nightmare memories of Shizuo’s voice cracking into shock over his name? He doesn’t know, can’t make a decision; if he could find the cause he thinks he’d root it out of him, would tear out whatever part of his soul won’t stop crying out for the magnetic pull of Shizuo’s voice in his ear, whatever part of his heart murmurs so steadily of the direction of _home_ no matter where he is or what he’s doing. But he can’t find them, search how he may, and he can’t continue living with his old scars torn open and refusing to heal; and that leaves him only two choices, calling back or wasting away, and Izaya’s never been willing to die at any hand but Shizuo’s.

It’s still not easy to do. He spends hours on his couch, sitting with his legs crossed in front of him and his knees aching dully up the whole length of his spine while he stares at the phone left in pieces on the floor. He can’t make himself touch it; it’s as if he’s convinced himself it carries the same electric weight of Shizuo’s breathing within its matte exterior, as if it’s the embodiment of the tether still urging him back towards the city and the life he has tried his best to leave behind. So he stares at it instead, breathing slow to push back the edge of panic that tries to rise in him every time he thinks of Shizuo’s voice knocked so open on shock, and he inches himself back towards rationality breath by strained breath.

At least he doesn’t have to decide what to do. He can’t touch his old phone, and he can’t retreat back to silence; at least he has that much, that he can recognize his own self-destructive impulses when they reemerge to sweep over him. He can hardly push them aside, has never been able to ignore them; so he copes, he mitigates, he lights tarot cards on fire and he laughs instead of crying and now, here, he crosses and uncrosses his legs, and stares at the screen of his new phone, and remembers standing in Ikebukuro in the clear of a distant night that he thought would be his last. Then he had been calling a monster, then he had been summoning what he expected to be his own end; like taunting the grim reaper himself, like looking over the edge of a building and smiling before letting his feet slip over the ledge. This time it’s just a phone call, just dialing a number to hear a familiar voice against his ear.

Izaya is a lot more scared this time.

It’s hard to dial the number. He has to think through every press of his finger against the screen, has to pause to breathe after every entry. Once the whole is there he stares at it for a long, long time, willing his heartbeat to ease, knowing that he has as little control over this aspect of his existence as anything else. He can’t calm his breathing, can’t steady the tremor running through his hands; he can’t even keep himself from this phone call, in the end, any more than he could resist the urge when it first struck him. He wonders if it’s a function of his own weakness, if he could fight against the overwhelming need to bruise damage into his own psyche if he were someone else. He wonders if Shizuo could do it. And then he sets his teeth, and presses the button, and lifts his phone to his ear.

It rings a handful of times. There’s not the immediate response Izaya had half-expected; but then, it’s been a week in reality, not the handful of eternity-laden minutes it seems to be in the span of his mind. Shizuo has forgotten, maybe, has moved on with the usual flow of his life just as he did the last time Izaya left him alone; and then there’s a _click_ against Izaya’s ear, and immediately, without so much as pausing for a breath, “Izaya?”

Izaya would swear his heart skips a beat. It’s too much, to have the strain of his need so abruptly satisfied, to hear the sharp edges of his name on Shizuo’s tongue again; it’s only the fact that he has no breath in him at all that keeps him from an audible reaction. As it is his tongue is stopped to stillness, his voice trapped by the knot in his throat; but it doesn’t make a difference anyway, because Shizuo is still talking.

“It’s you, isn’t it.” Not a question; a statement, a judgment, certainty so heavy on the words Izaya can feel it like a weight crushing down against his shoulders. “It was you all along. Why did you call me?” A pause; but it’s not soft like it was before, it’s rough, now, as brittle as Izaya feels himself becoming under the force of Shizuo’s words. “Did you call anyone else?” Another beat. “Was it just me?” Shizuo doesn’t even wait for answer for that last; he’s continuing, now, speaking fast like the words are toppling out of him, like Izaya’s silence is drawing more speech from him than dialogue ever did. “ _Why_ did you call me? You haven’t contacted me in months, for all I knew you went off and died somewhere. Why _now_? Things are good for me right now, I don’t--” A sharp laugh, raw with the sudden realization of hurt. “Is that why? Did you just want to ruin my life again?”

 _No_ , Izaya wants to say. _Yes. I want you to stop forgetting me._ But he has no voice, no answers to the demands Shizuo is making of him; he never has, really, all he can do is close his mouth and close his eyes and let the raw edge of Shizuo’s emotion crash into him with all the force of a blow.

“It’s been days,” Shizuo says, like Izaya isn’t aware of that, as if Izaya hasn’t counted every conversation with him like a fresh scar across his psyche. “I’ve been talking to someone I thought was a stranger and you’ve just been _listening_. Was it fun for you?” There’s less of an edge on the words than Izaya expected; they sound almost like a sincere question, might pass for one if Shizuo didn’t keep talking immediately. “Did you just want to know what was going on? Shinra could have told you, you know. _Anyone_ could have told you. Why _me_ , Izaya? Why did you call me?”

Shizuo does fall silent, there. The line is ringing with the afterimage of his words; Izaya can feel the tremor of them shaking across his shoulders, like Shizuo has slammed the weight of his clenched fist against the whole of Izaya’s present life and rattled it down to its very foundations. But he doesn’t have an answer to this question, doesn’t want to speak even if he had words to give; and after a long span of seconds Shizuo takes a breath and heaves an enormous sigh against the other end of the line.

“I don’t even know if it really is you,” he says, and he sounds heavy, worn-out, defeated in a way Izaya has never heard him sound before. “Maybe this is a total stranger I’ve been yelling at. Sorry, if it is. I thought you were…” His voice stills, the quiet overflows with all the ways he could finish that sentence. “Someone I used to know.” It’s an absurd oversimplification; even if Izaya were the stranger Shizuo is now speaking to, he wouldn’t believe the offhand dismissal of a subject so obviously rife with backstory. But Shizuo is pulling away from the conversation, is retreating back from that first flare of emotion, and Izaya can do nothing but listen to him draw back towards the life that has no space for Izaya in it, now. “If you don’t want to talk, I have other things I need to do today. Bye.”

Izaya keeps holding the phone to his ear for minutes after the call goes flat with the broken connection. It’s hard to pull it away, hard to impose a distance between himself and the sound of Shizuo’s voice speaking to him directly, Shizuo’s voice growling over those syllables to shudder mingled satisfaction and terror down Izaya’s spine. Finally he uncrosses his legs, lets his feet fall heavy to the floor in front of him, and draws his phone away from his ear to set on the table without looking at the screen.

The motion eases the cause of the hurt, but the pain lingers far longer.


	7. Communicate

Things are a little better, the next morning.

Izaya isn’t sure what to attribute this to. Maybe it’s that his mind finally grew tired of clinging to the tension that has kept him fighting off insomnia for the last several nights; maybe it’s the physical exhaustion in his body finally demanding more rest than his racing thoughts have previously let him have. Maybe it’s that he has nothing left to think about, that his anxious analysis has finally run through all the possibilities and now all he can do is wait for whatever new development his life will bring him. All he knows is that he goes to bed, and falls asleep at once, and sleeps through the night uninterrupted by too-busy thoughts or shadowed nightmares either one.

The last possibility -- that it’s the sound of Shizuo’s voice that has let him collapse into some measure of rest again -- he doesn’t let himself think about at all, even in the drowsy moments as he drifts into unconsciousness.

He wakes refreshed, or the closest thing to it he’s has in some time. Managing the shower is something of a chore, as it has been since he gave up Ikebukuro and the painless use of his legs at once; but it’s familiar, at least, and if he has to allow almost three times as long as he once did for the basic task it’s not as if that’s a new development. The hot water soothes his mind, steadies out the uncomfortable sense of something left undone that always comes with such an abrupt cessation of stress; by the time he emerges he’s ready to linger over making his first cup of coffee without fretting over the necessary wait that comes with producing something truly worth drinking. He browses forum posts on his phone as he waits, his thoughts wandering idly over the goings-on of his current location while his apartment fills with the smell of fresh-ground coffee soaking in hot water, and if he knows he’s doing this to avoid thinking about anything else, that doesn’t make it less effective.

He really does manage to lose himself in his work, once he has his coffee to guide him. It’s easier to navigate multiple tabs on his computer once he settles himself at his desk; he can manage several one-handed while keeping his other idly tracing out the handle of the mug alongside him. The information washes over him, names and relationships and gossip all tangling together into a single flood of details enough to push aside whatever personal stress he may be carrying; for a while he can forget everything about himself, and his past, and even Shizuo for losing himself in the intricacies of his present.

He has no idea how long he spends there. His attention is caught in what he’s doing; even when his cup sits empty beside him he doesn’t get up to refill it, doesn’t run the risk of losing the almost meditative state of calm he’s attained in the pattern of his fingers on the keyboard before him and the scroll of text in front of his eyes. He’s entirely focused on the screen, all his self-awareness given over to the information in front of him, and when his phone rings it’s a distant note, a distraction that fits itself into the edges of his awareness instead of disrupting the flow of thought he’s caught in. Izaya reaches for his phone with his free hand without looking away from his screen, taps his thumb against the _Answer_ key, and brings the phone to his ear without thinking about the action at all. “Hello?”

There’s a huff of an exhale on the other end of the line, a sigh of something weighting with frustration and relief at once; and then, clear and rough with intensity: “I _knew_ it was you,” and Izaya’s skin goes icy with the sound of Shizuo’s voice at his ear.

Izaya’s hand stills on the keyboard, Izaya’s attention fractures away from his computer like it was never there at all. “ _Ah._ ”

“It’s been you this whole time,” Shizuo says. “ _Izaya_.”

Izaya’s heart is racing in his chest, his mouth is open on that first shocked realization of his own mistake. He can’t think of words, can’t find any kind of coherency for his thoughts or for his voice. He’s just staring unseeing at the flicker of motion still playing across his computer screen, not reading the text any more than he’s thinking about anything other than Shizuo’s voice at his ear, Shizuo saying his name, Shizuo knowing it’s _him_.

“You’ve been calling me,” Shizuo says, like this detail needs to be clarified, or maybe just because he needs to say it to himself, needs to work through the implications of what they both know, now, to be true. “For _days_. You’ve been listening to me tell you about my life.” There’s a pause, a moment for Izaya to stare blankly at his computer screen and Shizuo to wait for some kind of a response; then Shizuo sighs against the phone, the sound so rushed and frustrated it’s almost a growl. “What, are you going to go back to saying nothing? Maybe you’ll hang up on me again?”

Izaya shakes his head, the movement tiny and inaudible for Shizuo on the other end of the line. He has to shut his eyes before he can focus himself enough to speak, has to swallow hard before he can find the space in his throat to offer words, and Shizuo is already taking a breath to continue. “Listen, if you just--”

“No.”

Izaya’s voice is very quiet against the line; he can barely hear the word in his own ears, isn’t even sure the sound will be able to carry over the distance to Shizuo on the other end. But Shizuo’s words cut off as if that one negation carried the edge of the knife Izaya used to flourish in the sunlight of Ikebukuro, as if Izaya’s scored another hit as startling as the line of crimson he left across Shizuo’s chest the day they met. There’s silence on the line, the quiet stretching taut with possibility neither of them takes; and then Shizuo breathes out again, a sigh too soft for Izaya to attribute any kind of clear emotion to the brief spill of sound.

“I really didn’t know if it was you,” he says, and his voice is soft, now, more a murmur than anything else. It makes him sound closer, like he’s crossed all the miles between them just by letting his words fall out of anger. “Even after you hung up on me. And then you called again and you were still so quiet, it just didn’t make any sense. You’re _never_ quiet, you’ve never been--” and he cuts himself off sharply, as if he’s remembered who he’s talking to, as if the force of Izaya’s name is enough to break off the casual rambling that Izaya had from him for a week. Izaya lifts a hand to his face, and presses his palm against his shut eyes, and he doesn’t say anything, just waits in silence until Shizuo sighs again.

“I don’t understand you,” he says, admission instead of accusation. “It’s been months since I heard from you. Why would you call now? Why didn’t you want me to know it was you? I would have told you what was going on in the city if you just had asked.”

 _No_ , Izaya thinks and doesn’t say. _You wouldn’t have told me anything. You would have asked why I wanted to know and refused to tell me anything I really wanted to hear, just like you’re doing now._ But that’s too much admission, that’s too close to things Izaya doesn’t want to think about, much less give voice to; and so he does the only thing he can do, the only thing he’s _been_ doing, and he stays quiet.

Shizuo clears his throat into the quiet. “There’s not much going on,” he says stiffly, apparently trying to offer what he thinks Izaya wants, as if it was ever the details of the city that Izaya cared about and not the easy almost-friendliness of Shizuo rambling about the details of his life. “Everything has been really quiet since...”

“Since I left,” Izaya finishes for him, since Shizuo doesn’t seem capable of framing those words to speech. His voice feels rusty in his throat, like he can’t recall how to speak properly; it’s hard to enunciate his words so they’ll come clear over the phone line. “I know. You told me.”

Shizuo huffs something low and frustrated, a growl without teeth to give it audibility. “Right. Great. What _else_ did I tell you when I thought you were a complete stranger?” It’s a rhetorical question, for once, not one of the open-ended pleas for communication he used to give; Izaya squeezes his eyes shut tighter behind the cover of his hand, tries to not think about the way his throat is knotting tight around the pressure of his breathing in his chest. Shizuo pauses again, falls silent for a moment; and then: “Fuck,” like resignation, like surrender to some force greater than he is, something too strong for even Heiwajima Shizuo to push back against. “I don’t have any idea how to talk to you like this.”

 _You did fine before_ , Izaya wants to say; but of course that was different, Shizuo wasn’t talking to _him_ then. Then he was talking to a silent phone line, to some odd but affable stranger created from his own ideas about the kind of person who would call and listen to him talk without speaking for hours; it’s different, now, with Izaya’s voice and Izaya’s name to couple with that silence, until what had been friendly coexistence looks like some kind of a malicious plot in retrospect. Izaya can’t even blame Shizuo for that; he almost wishes he could adopt the other’s certainty, wishes he could find out what cunning plan he had in mind when he dialed Shizuo’s number that first night. It would be easier to tell himself it was intentional, easier to attribute his actions to some malicious ploy instead of to the ache of unshakeable loneliness in his chest, the weight of unhappiness that crushes him to breathless panic in the long, silent, empty hours of the dark nights.

On the other end of the line Shizuo huffs an exhale, the sound loud and crackling against the receiver until Izaya can hear the distance between them in the sound of static at his ear. “Are you planning to say anything at all?”

Izaya has to swallow hard to clear his throat of the knot choking him, has to shake his head in another reaction that goes unheard and unnoticed by Shizuo. “I don’t know.”

Shizuo snorts a humorless laugh. “I guess that’s a start,” he says. “Listen. I can’t keep talking to you like a stranger now that I know it’s you.” Izaya knew that, Izaya could have told Shizuo that himself; it still hurts to have it confirmed, to know that the satisfaction gained from those silent phone calls has slipped from his grasp along with everything else. “And I don’t want to just talk if you’re not going to say anything. So. If you feel like talking…call, I guess.”

It’s Izaya’s turn to sketch the outline of laughter, of amusement he doesn’t feel. “Will you answer?”

“I don’t know.” The answer is quick, unhesitating; Izaya almost appreciates the brutal honesty of it. “Maybe. If I know it’s you. Call from this number or your first one if you do.”

Izaya swallows. “Okay.”

“I might not pick up,” Shizuo says again, as if to clarify this detail, like there’s any chance at all Izaya might have misunderstood it. “I haven’t decided if I want to talk to you. But if you want to actually talk and not just listen…” Izaya can almost hear Shizuo’s shrug in the brief silence, imagines he can see the shift of the other’s shoulder angling up towards his ear. “Maybe. I dunno. If you call I’ll decide then.”

It’s not what Izaya would like to hear; but then, he supposes it’s probably significantly more than he deserves. It’s not like he has a choice, anyway. “Okay.”

“That’s all I have to say right now,” Shizuo says. “I’ll talk to you later, maybe. If you call.”

“If you pick up,” Izaya counters. “Yes.”

“Yeah.” Shizuo clears his throat, like he’s hesitating over how to end the conversation; then he huffs into resignation and chooses the simplest route. “Bye.”

The phone goes silent before Izaya can respond, before Izaya can decide if he wants to respond. He closes his mouth on whatever he might have said, farewell or gratitude or apology, if he had the time to muster it; and instead he draws his phone away from his ear, and reaches out to set it against the surface of the desk without opening his eyes. He lifts his free hand up to his face to join the first in weighting darkness over his already-shut eyes, to press against his eyelids until they ache with the pressure; and he leans hard against his elbows, and breathes slowly, and waits for some measure of calm to come back to him.

It will take a while, he suspects. At least he doesn’t have anyone waiting on him.


	8. Struggle

Izaya calls back.

He hadn’t been sure he was going to. Even after his racing heartrate eased and his breathing steadied back from the edge of panic he hadn’t made up his mind to actually take Shizuo up on his offer. It was easier to leave his phone untouched, to return his attention to the missed messages on the computer screen in front of him and to fall back into that sense of disembodied information, where Izaya can linger for a brief while in the form of knowledge alone without any of the burden of emotions that so undo any kind of rationality in him. He spends his whole morning like that, gazing at his computer screen without allowing himself so much as a moment to think about the call, or the sound of Shizuo’s voice, or the open-ended invitation the other offered; until finally the demands of his hungry body pull him back into awareness of his physical state, and he has to obtain some kind of meal to fill the need for lunch. He eats mechanically, with his mind as blank of thoughts as he can manage, and he returns to work immediately after; but somewhere over the course of the unthinking hours he comes to a decision, because over dinner he realizes he’s thinking about _when_ to call Shizuo, rather than _if_.

Not tonight, he decides as soon as he becomes aware of the thought. They spoke once this morning, however awkward and unsatisfying the conversation was; and Izaya still feels fragile, like all his bones have been turned to glass and could shatter with a strong breeze, much less the violent force that Shizuo wields with such casual unconcern. And if Izaya _is_ desperate he doesn’t want to seem so, doesn’t want to admit how far he’s willing to go just for a few second’s worth of Shizuo’s voice at his ear. The fact seems obvious to him, seems to have been made abundantly clear by his actions over the last few weeks; but Shizuo doesn’t seem to understand yet, at least, and if Izaya can’t understand how the other can be so oblivious he’s not going to complain about his good luck. So he won’t call tonight, certainly; and he tells himself that as a lullaby, as a makeshift means of drawing himself down into the rest his aching body and overtaxed mind both demand of him today.

 _I can call Shizuo_. It’s the first thing he thinks upon waking, the first conscious thought that enters his head; and that is alarming in itself, without even thinking about the breathless anticipation that the idea carries with it as it slips into his thoughts. Izaya lies still in bed for long minutes, as if to punish himself for the idea with boredom sufficient to drive it from his mind; he’s made no decision, he tells himself, no commitment and no promise. There’s no reason for him to call Shizuo today, nothing at all insisting that he do so; and he barely wants to, anyway, not when their last conversation was so stiff and strained over all the gaps of things left unsaid. He doesn’t really feel like talking anyway, he tells himself, his throat feels a little bit achy as if he might be coming down with a cough; it’ll be better if he saves himself from unnecessary speech, surely he can call later in the week when he has more of interest to report of his own life. Izaya stares at the wall of his bedroom, and constructs lie after lie after lie; and finally he has enough to form a wall of denial to let him face the day, and the morning, and the inevitability of the call he knows he’s going to make as soon as he can get his hands to stop shaking long enough to dial.

Shizuo might not even pick up, Izaya tells himself as he emerges from the shower with a hand still pushing at the towel draped over his wet hair. He shouldn’t even expect a conversation; more likely than not he’ll ring through to voicemail, and then he can hang up and leave the record of a missed call to cause Shizuo whatever guilt he may feel under the circumstances.

It’ll only take a minute. Izaya’s confident in this, secure in his assumption about how this will proceed; the delay of a handful of seconds to let his call ring through and he can undo Shizuo’s comfort for hours, can leave the other to frown and fret over his cowardice in not picking up Izaya’s call for the whole long span of the day. Maybe he’ll be upset, maybe he’ll be angry; Izaya doesn’t care what Shizuo feels so long as he feels it, so long as the force of his emotion carries the thought of Izaya into his head through to the evening. Maybe he’ll even call back again tonight, after Shizuo’s had hours to stew himself into a better response, into some snapping comeback to persuade him to pick up the phone; and the ringing against Izaya’s ear cuts off, the line comes alive, and “Izaya,” Shizuo says as all of Izaya’s constructed plans collapse at once to the simple fact of Shizuo answering his phone.

Izaya’s mind goes blank. He hadn’t realized he was dialing Shizuo’s number, hadn’t thought through the fact of what he was doing; the action had been distant, almost reflexive, like he was watching someone else go through the movement while his own mind wandered down the path of fantasy he built for himself. Shizuo wasn’t supposed to answer, Shizuo wasn’t supposed to pick up; but he did, and he has, and now Izaya is left with the rubble of his own imagination filling his thoughts and not so much as a greeting left for him on his tongue.

Shizuo growls, a low note of warning at the back of his throat. “I told you if you called--”

“I’m talking,” Izaya says, the words torn from him on a shudder of panic too strong for him to restrain. “Hi.”

Shizuo huffs, relief audible on the sound of his exhale. “Hi.”

Izaya scrambles for something to say, for some kind of coherency to offer to the expectant silence on the other end of the phone line. “How’s your morning?”

“Barely started,” Shizuo says at once. “I haven’t even left my apartment yet.”

“Oh,” Izaya says. “Yes. Me either.”

The line goes silent again. Izaya wonders if Shizuo will hang up on him if he runs out of words to offer, wonders if a lack of conversational topics is equivalent to an unwillingness to speak at all; but Shizuo takes some pity on him in this, at least, and clears his throat roughly on the other end of the connection.

“I’ve got work in a couple hours,” he says, sounding awkward over the statement as he didn’t before, when he didn’t have the knowledge of Izaya’s identity to stem the flow of words from his tongue. “Are you working at...wherever you are?”

Izaya huffs the outline of a laugh. It’s more nervous than amused. “Yes, Shizu-chan, I have found suitable employment for myself here.” He doesn’t specify where _here_ is. Shizuo doesn’t ask.

“That’s good,” Shizuo says, without really sounding like he means it. “Do you have set hours or anything like that?”

“Are you asking if I’m still working as an informant?” Izaya suggests, since Shizuo seems to be struggling with the words. “I don’t think you’d approve of my work here, if that’s what you’re thinking. Sorry to disappoint.”

“That’s not what I--” Shizuo starts, and then cuts himself off sharply, his words giving way to a hiss of frustration. “You’re just as irritating now as you used to be.”

“At least that hasn’t changed,” Izaya fires back; but he can’t find the structure for continued amusement, can’t get traction against the polished calm of the life he knows Shizuo has now, without him. It’s always been harder to rile Shizuo up with just words and no physical presence, and always less satisfying even when he achieves it; it’s too easy for Shizuo to lose his temper and just hang up to end the interaction, like this. It makes Izaya feel edgy, like he’s lost the upper hand before they even began; or maybe that’s a function of those months apart, maybe it’s from a too-clear sense of how easily Shizuo has moved on with his life in Izaya’s absence. The thought stings, even offered from Izaya’s own mind instead of at Shizuo’s lips; it’s enough to strip all the almost-entertainment from Izaya’s words and to pull the corners of his mouth down into unhappiness instead. He leans forward over his knees and shuts his eyes as he lifts a hand to push through the damp weight of his hair. “It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? I’m not going to mess with your city anymore, Shizu-chan, you don’t have to worry about that.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Shizuo says, so immediately Izaya actually believes him. “I just--” He cuts himself off again. Izaya sets his jaw on silence and waits for Shizuo to figure out what he wants to say. There’s a heartbeat of a pause, a delay that stretches to span the distance between them; and then Shizuo heaves a sigh, and Izaya flinches from the resignation on the sound before the other even speaks.

“This is stupid,” he says, the words more dissatisfied than angry. “I don’t know what to say.”

“What a surprise,” Izaya says, making a bid at a mocking drawl he can feel flag and fail as quickly as he musters it. “Something we can agree on.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says, but there’s no heat on the word any more than there was an edge to Izaya’s. It’s like Shizuo has chilled, like all the fire that used to spark behind his eyes has gone cold just as the blade of Izaya’s words has dulled. Izaya wonders if it’s his fault, wonders if he could find that molten core of Shizuo’s anger again if he only knew how to dig for it; or if it’s a sign of the gap between them, if it’s indicative of the distance of space and time together that he’ll never find a way to cross to get back to what they once had. The idea twists his stomach and knots his throat on nausea, but Shizuo isn’t waiting for him to speak, isn’t pausing for a reply Izaya doesn’t have to give. “I’m not going to sit on the phone being awkward just because you don’t know what you want to say. I’ve got better things to do with my morning.”

 _That’s a surprise_ , Izaya wants to drawl. _Have you become a productive member of society when I wasn’t looking, Shizu-chan?_ But the taunt dies in his throat before he can even attempt to give it voice, the words knot to choke him on the bitter dregs of his own attempts at drawing a response from the other; and when he opens his mouth what comes out instead is “Will you answer if I can call again?” with a horrible, desperate edge to the words he can feel tear apart whatever facade of dignity he might have made. He flinches again, cringing back from the sound of his own voice going so obviously wanting, but Shizuo is already gusting a sigh of response on the other end of the line.

“I don’t know,” he says. “If I have something to say, I will. Or if I want to hear what you have to say.” His tone implies this second possibility to be approximately as likely as hell freezing over. “I’m not promising you anything.”

“Yeah,” Izaya says. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Shizuo huffs a breath into the receiver; for a moment it sounds almost like a laugh, the crackle of static that clings to the sound granting it a sincerity it surely lacks in reality. “You’re still trying to predict what other people will do,” he says. “That hasn’t changed, at least.” And then he’s hanging up, breaking off the connection cleanly, without even the word of farewell Izaya merited before.

Izaya’s not sure if he’s glad of that or not. He’s relieved to not have Shizuo’s _goodbye_ left ringing in his ears as he lowers his phone to his lap again; but there’s just silence in its place, and he’s never done well with quiet.


	9. Impulsive

Izaya thinks about Shizuo for the rest of the day.

It’s not on purpose. He’s doing things, getting his work done and barely so much as glancing at his phone on the breaks he takes to fetch himself another cup of coffee; but in the back of his mind is that judgment, _you don’t know what you want to say_ , and every interaction he has frames itself around that, shifting into the outline of entertainment, into the structure of a story he can tell. This customer is an oddity, a character suitable to fit into the array of unique individuals Shizuo spends his days with; that request is the beginnings of a possible story, something Izaya can flesh out and expand with what could generously be called invention and Shizuo would likely term lies. But Shizuo isn’t here to fact check, and Izaya can spin his fantasies as wild as he likes for the sake of interest, and if it gives him something to say on the phone it’ll be more than worth it.

He keeps working late into the evening, responding to inquiries as quickly as they come in and delving into gossip channels in the meantime, scouring message boards and chatrooms for interesting details as much for the purposes of giving him something to talk about as for a source of possible drama to meddle in. He pauses only for dinner, and then it’s a brief one, eaten quickly and without attention on his couch before he returns to his desk, and it’s only once his eyes are blurring with exhaustion and his mind is dragging over the effort of his thoughts that he finally is willing to admit the daily defeat of his motivation by inevitable exhaustion. He closes down his browser windows, powers down his computer, and pushes back from the edge of his desk, letting himself relax into comfort against the support of his wheelchair as he reaches out for his phone turned face-down on the desk next to him.

It’s too late to call. The bright display of Izaya’s screen informs him it’s only a few minutes shy of midnight; even Izaya rarely answers calls this late, and he suspects Shizuo will be completely asleep by now, tangled face-down in his blankets with one leg thrown wide of the sheets and his usual frown relaxed into the slack weight of unconsciousness against the pillow. He’s unlikely to stir again tonight; once Shizuo is asleep there’s almost nothing that will wake him short of actual contact with his skin. _That_ brings him jolting awake, reaching out to seize fingers tight around the source of the contact before his eyes are even open; but that was fun too, sometimes, on those nights Izaya wanted something more than just watching. All it took was the ghost of fingertips against Shizuo’s waist, or bare knee, or the back of his neck; and Shizuo would move as if on cue, surging up and forward to close the unbreakable restraint of his fingers on Izaya’s arm, or shoulder, or hair, anything to give him enough traction to drag the other down into involuntary submission while Shizuo growled and blinked himself into full consciousness. Izaya can still remember the way Shizuo’s eyes would narrow in recognition as he made sense of who it was under him, can recall the drag of his own lips onto the smirk that never failed to pull a rumble of anger from Shizuo’s chest; and then he has to blink, and shake his head to free himself of the siren song of those memories too vivid to let him review them in calm.

His face is still warmer than it should be as he dials Shizuo’s number, his breathing still coming faster than it ought; but Shizuo can’t see him, and Shizuo won’t pick up, and Izaya will have the length of the other’s voicemail message to steady himself into something casual, and teasing, and suitably charming to grit Shizuo’s teeth with the missed opportunity when he wakes to the message in the morning. Izaya is framing the words in his head as he waits for the phone to ring itself through to the message, is shaping and discarding phrases with only a fraction of his attention to the sound of the ringing at his ear; and then there’s a _click_ , the sound unexpected enough to startle him into attention, and “Hey,” in a tone low and heavy with the weight of sleep. “Izaya.”

All the words Izaya intended to offer are blown right out of his head at once. He’s left gaping on the other end of the phone, speechless and thoughtless for a long span while his mind tries to scramble itself back into some kind of clarity; and finally:

“Shizu-chan,” he croaks, sounding far more startled out of himself than he wishes he did. “I didn’t think you would be awake.”

“I wasn’t,” Shizuo says, but it doesn’t even sound irritated; he just sounds sleepy, like he’s still tangled in the weight of his dreams as much as the catch of his blankets. There’s the sound of cloth shifting, of a mattress squeaking; Izaya has the brief, vivid image of Shizuo rolling over onto his back, of sheets sliding free from the thin t-shirt he wears to bed, of long legs left bare from foot to thigh by the careless slip of the sheets. “Why are you calling?”

 _You weren’t supposed to pick up_ , Izaya wants to protest. _You were supposed to let me go to voicemail so I could leave a message for you and ruin your morning_. But he can’t give voice to the petty vindictiveness of his intentions, even if that is precisely what he wants to do; so he goes the other direction, pitches his tone as offhand and careless as he can manage with his heart racing on rising panic in his chest. “Is this not a good time for you? I thought I might tell you a bedtime story to lull you off to sweet dreams back in Ikebukuro.”

Shizuo huffs something dangerously close to a laugh, filtered as it is through the drag of sleep on his voice. “You’d be more likely to give me nightmares,” he says, but it’s not harsh in spite of the grate of his voice; if anything it sounds nearly teasing, like he’s more amused than otherwise. “You just wanted to interrupt my sleep.”

“Ah,” Izaya says. “You saw right through me.” It’s easy to surrender to Shizuo’s mistaken assumption; Izaya would far prefer Shizuo think him malicious than parse together the true desperation that lies under his actions. He takes a breath to steady himself and reaches for the offhand amusement that he would offer were his reasons truly as simple and petty as those Shizuo attributes to him. “I have lots to talk about, Shizu-chan. I hope you weren’t planning to get much rest tonight.”

Izaya is expecting Shizuo to growl at this, to offer some incoherent noise of protest or maybe just to hang up on him altogether. It would feel like a victory, he thinks, to win such sincere aggression from the other; and surely then he’ll turn his phone off, and Izaya can take the time he needs to collect himself before he calls back to leave the purring taunt of the message he had originally intended to compose. But Shizuo’s only protest is a huff against the receiver, a rush of sound that shivers hyperawareness down the whole of Izaya’s spine, and “Seriously?” with so much amusement underneath it that it sounds far closer to a laugh than the anger Izaya was trying to draw. “What, have you been thinking about what to say to me all day?”

Shizuo says it like this idea is absurd, like he’s making a joke of some impossible suggestion. It makes Izaya’s skin go cold, makes his scalp prickle with awareness of that too-close hit, of that casual swing that Shizuo means to be playful and Izaya can feel as ghostly almost-bruises against his skin.

“Of course I haven’t,” Izaya says, tipping his head back and tossing his hair to imitate the offhand ease he would have once been able to give to those words without thinking. “Please, Shizu-chan, do you think I spend all day pining for the sound of your voice?” Izaya scoffs at the idea, feeling the lie of his own dismissal burn hot against the back of his throat. “I have a lot on my plate, I don’t have hours to spend waiting on you.”

The untruth is obvious, if Shizuo looks for it; Izaya can feel the weight of those previous silent calls bearing down on him with the force of their evidence, with their ability to unravel all his claims of not-caring into the transparent desperation they are in truth. But Shizuo has never been very good at catching Izaya in the lies he tries to tell, and that, at least, hasn’t changed; he huffs acknowledgment now, as if Izaya has actually managed to score a blow in the midst of the flailing no less desperate for how polished the facade over it is.

“You called for some reason,” he says, sounding vaguely defensive, as if he has anything at all to defend in his perfectly accurate assumption. “Is midnight the time you feel particularly chatty?”

“Maybe it is,” Izaya tells him. “I have the most time late at night, after all, I’m far less likely to be interrupted by other important things.”

Shizuo snorts. “Other than sleep.”

“Sleep is overrated,” Izaya says. “Do you really enjoy wasting hours of your day to vivid hallucinations while lying unconscious?”

“I enjoy not being exhausted,” Shizuo says. “That’s enough for me.”

“Ah.” Izaya lets his tone sound intrigued and faintly entertained, as if the idea of a full night’s sleep is something quaint and charmingly old-fashioned. “How simplistic.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shizuo sighs with more resignation than irritation. Izaya wonders if he really is losing his touch or if it’s just Shizuo’s drowsy state that is so stealing away the anger Izaya’s trying to elicit from the other’s reaction. There’s a sound of sheets rustling, blankets moving under Shizuo as he shifts; his yawn against the receiver of the phone is drawn-out, a low thrum of sound Izaya can feel against his spine like the low note of a tuning fork. “So what _did_ you do with your day, if it was so interesting and exciting?”

Izaya’s mind goes blank. He’s been collecting stories all day, cataloguing teasing phrases and intriguing tales to offer in response to this exact question; and they all shatter under the force of Shizuo’s direct inquiry, collapsing into dust in his mind as quickly as he reaches for them. He’s trying to recall the whole of his day, trying to orient himself against the backdrop of his current life and the negotiations and information he deals in on a daily basis; and all he can think about is Ikebukuro, all he can picture is the tangle of yellow hair in a night-dark bedroom and a t-shirt pulling up off bare skin in surrender to the motion of a languid stretch.

“I worked,” he says finally, aware even as he offers the words how dull they sound. “I get a lot more done here than I ever used to, you know, it’s a lot easier to be productive when I don’t have a certain someone meddling in my affairs.”

“You’re still ruining lives, then?” Shizuo asks. He doesn’t sound angry about this either; surely it’s the effect of the sleep still clinging to his voice that’s dipping the words so soft, surely it’s the force of his current mental state that makes him sound so nearly fond on the question. “At least I can count on you causing trouble even when you’re out of the city.” He shifts again; Izaya keeps his eyes open, keeps his mind carefully focused on the details of his own living room and not the imagined outline of Shizuo’s bed. “Not that I ever really stopped you even in Ikebukuro.”

“Mm,” Izaya hums. “You can claim credit for a few times.” He pauses for ostentatious consideration. “Maybe twice. At least once, for sure.”

Shizuo does laugh, then, a spill of sound so radiant against the phone that Izaya would swear he can feel his skin go hot as if with sunburn, as if the mere sound of Shizuo’s amusement is enough to burn the pale of his skin with heat he’s unaccustomed to. “Just one time?”

“I think that was mostly a group effort anyway,” Izaya caveats. “I might be able to give you fifty percent credit, since I’m feeling generous.”

“Really,” Shizuo purrs. “Maybe your memory is just faulty, I can remember a whole handful of times.”

“Can you,” Izaya drawls. “I think if either of us is out of touch with reality here it’s you, Shizu-chan.”

“You’re such a liar,” Shizuo tells him without more than the grate of laughter on the words. “What about that whole bullshit with that magic sword or whatever?”

Izaya blinks. “Ah,” he says, his thoughts skidding out against the memory. That hadn’t gone at all the way he intended -- Saika falls into the category of inhuman things outside of his own control as much as Shizuo himself -- but he’s hardly about to admit that to Shizuo, not when it’s unlikely to get him credit for anything more than the lying Shizuo already believes him to be doing. “That turned out exactly as intended.”

Shizuo snorts. “With me beating dozens of people to a pulp?”

“Yes,” Izaya says. “The sword was an unpredictable force, I could hardly fight it myself. You were as good a tool as any to deal with the problem.” In actual fact the memory prickles his skin with chill -- he never liked Saika, its power or its perspective either one -- but he doesn’t let the cold touch his voice with so much as a shiver. “And you got to work off your anger on them instead of on _me_ , a fact for which I am endlessly grateful.”

“Yeah?” Shizuo says, still sounding amused. “You weren’t even a little bit disappointed?”

“Come on, Shizu-chan,” Izaya tells him. “I’m not so much of a masochist that I would be _disappointed_ about saving myself broken bones.”

Shizuo’s exhale gusts hard against the receiver of the phone. “I wasn’t talking about broken bones,” he says, and that’s not much of a statement by itself but the shadow on his voice fills in all the gaps of meaning with implication so strong that Izaya’s vision blurs at once, his attention to the present fracturing instantly to the weight of remembered past. He catches a breath before he means to, his lungs dragging hard at air as all the blood in his body goes hot at once; and at the other end of the line Shizuo hums a laugh that manages to come out smoky and amused at the same time.

“I can’t believe I’m the one who has to remind you,” he says, sounding almost delighted at this fact. “When _you’re_ the one who always had lube in your pocket every time I caught up to you.”

Izaya can feel the friction of Shizuo’s words like a touch trailing against the back of his neck, like fingertips dipping into the shadows of memory to draw forth details he has spent months trying to leave behind him. His hand tenses against the arm of his chair, his fingers curl into a grip against the handle as if to brace himself against the rush of heat in his veins; but it does nothing at all to prevent the surge of want that hits him, that strains against his thighs and draws the beginnings of arousal into him with the memory of too many shadowed-over interludes to count spilling free of the Pandora’s box of his past.

“Well of course,” Izaya manages to get out after a moment, without easing his hold on the arm of his wheelchair. “It pays to be prepared. God only knows what you would have done to me if you had caught me _without_ it.”

“Like the time after I chased you halfway across the city to that abandoned office building?” Shizuo wants to know. “Funny, you didn’t seem to mind that much at the time. Or was that just another one of your games?”

It wasn’t. Izaya can remember the scene with perfectly clarity, as if they’re there still: the almost complete dark of the interior of the empty building, without any way to orient himself against the world except for Shizuo’s hand clutching at his waist, Shizuo’s breath hot on his neck, Shizuo’s spit-wet fingers pushing into him. Izaya thinks he would have happily taken far more abuse than what he got from that interaction for the satisfaction of Shizuo so close against him, but as it was Shizuo had barely made it through his first thrust before Izaya was coming, shaking and panting and coming apart just from the first force, and Shizuo had followed him into orgasm seconds later, with his face buried against Izaya’s neck like he was trying to breathe the other bodily into his lungs, to fill himself with Izaya’s essence as entirely as he filled Izaya’s body with his own.

Izaya uncurls his fingers from the arm of his wheelchair and lifts his shaking fingers to press against the side of his neck. If he digs his fingernails in against the skin he can remember the edge of Shizuo’s teeth, can recall the drag of pain his heat-drunk body could never interpret as anything but pleasure. “You could have showed some initiative too, you know. I even made you a present of a bottle all your own, if you were too embarrassed to buy it yourself.”

Shizuo huffs a breath that’s a little bit of an exhale and the very outline of a laugh. “That time you decided to try crossdressing?” He sounds amused, his voice purring in the depths of his chest into a heat that Izaya can feel run through the whole of his body. “I thought that was just so you could be ready to follow through on what you were offering those boys you were flirting with.”

“I wrote your _name_ on it, Shizu-chan,” Izaya reminds him. “Or can you not read even that?”

“Shut up,” Shizuo says, but even that’s gentler than it should be, verging on something like affection against his tongue. There’s a pause, a gap of silence; then: “Do you still have that skirt?” with an attempt at off-hand disinterest that falls catastrophically short.

“Of course,” Izaya deadpans. “I like to wear it on weekends when I go out on the town. It’s a hit, you’ll be happy to know.” The truth -- that it’s shoved in the back of a box, as far from memory as Izaya can make it since he can’t find it in him to actually throw out the recollection of Shizuo’s hands shoving the hem up with desperate need to get to the bare skin of his thighs -- he leaves unvoiced even in his own mind.

“Shut up,” Shizuo growls again, with more heat on his voice this time. “You do not.” Izaya leaves that unanswered; better to keep his mouth shut anyway, when he’s not sure he can trust himself to speak in anything approaching a normal tone with how hot his body is going from the suggestion of Shizuo’s words. He’s hard inside his jeans without so much as pressing a palm against the fly; his hand is still against the side of his neck but he can feel his heart hammering in his chest, can feel the temptation to act knotting itself against his spine and tensing against his aching thighs.

Finally Shizuo takes a breath and sighs an exhale against the phone that Izaya feels run straight through him even before the other speaks. “Remember that time you came by my apartment in the middle of the night?”

Izaya lets his breath spill from his lips slow, carefully so he can keep the sound caught against his throat. “Maybe,” he allows, levelling off his words as he lets his hand trail down his chest, as he presses heat against the midline of his body while his fingers slide down towards the front of his jeans as silently as he can move them. “You’ll have to remind me of the specifics, Shizu-chan, I broke in a lot of times.”

Shizuo snorts. “You did not. I only remember once.”

“You only knew about once,” Izaya fires back, talking fast so his voice covers up whatever sound his zipper might make coming down. “You’re a _really_ deep sleeper.”

“Fuck you,” Shizuo says. “You’re saying you snuck into my bedroom and just watched me sleep?”

“Yep,” Izaya says. His thoughts are only barely on the subject of the conversation; he’s speaking more to keep Shizuo engaged in the discussion than anything else, to buy himself time while his heart pounds in his chest and he fumbles his jeans open for the weight of his fingers. “Doesn’t that freak you out, Shizu-chan?”

“I don’t believe you,” Shizuo tells him. “You’re such a _stalker_.”

“Oh, come on,” Izaya protests. His jeans are open now; he shifts his phone to his other ear, reaches up to brace it with his right hand so he can slide his left down over the tremor of his stomach and in under the weight of his open waistband. “You’re the one who chased me all over town whenever you caught so much as a glimpse of me. How many times did you actually get me back to a bed before your lust took over? Twice?”

“ _Nine_ times,” Shizuo says, the answer so immediate Izaya is left with no doubt at all that Shizuo can call each of those occasions up with the same crystal clarity that Izaya can himself. “Don’t make it sound like it was all my doing, you were just as desperate as I was usually.”

“I never said I didn’t want it,” Izaya says, trying to sound offhand and fairly certain he just sounds breathless. He’s curling his fingers in around himself, tightening his grip before he strokes up over the aching heat of his cock; the sensation flares heat into his body, drops his head back against the back of his chair, steals his breathing so for a moment all he can do is part his lips soundlessly on the air he can’t find for himself. His heart is racing, illicit pleasure crackling electric through his veins; but he presses his lips together, and takes a breath through his nose, and when he speaks again it’s without allowing space on his voice for the heat he’s stroking out into himself. “But I was always the one pinned back against the wall, if you remember.”

“I remember,” Shizuo growls, and Izaya shuts his eyes, then, as his present reality disintegrates to the heat of that voice rumbling down the length of his spine. “I remember you being pretty enthusiastic about your appreciation, too. I never forced you into anything.”

“No,” Izaya agrees. “You always did exactly what I expected you to. You were always easiest to manipulate when you were horny.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Shizuo tells him, and Izaya has to bite his lip against the whine that starts in his throat, has to tighten his fingers on himself as his hips jerk up involuntarily in answer to the rough edge on that voice. “You didn’t _manipulate_ me. I knew what I was doing.”

“Yeah,” Izaya says, and he knows he sounds breathless but he can’t judge, anymore, how giveaway his voice must be, can barely spare attention for anything other than the drag of his hand over himself and the grate of Shizuo’s voice in his ear. “Just fucking your archnemesis in the shadows of a backalley, no big deal, right?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Shizuo growls; and Izaya does moan, then, his exhale twisting on itself to pull free of his control on it. There’s no question about the sound, no possible way it can be misinterpreted as anything other than the overheated want it is; but Shizuo doesn’t comment on it, barely takes a breath before he goes on talking. “If you were here--”

“What?” Izaya asks, and his heart is pounding and his thoughts are dizzy but he’s talking anyway, tripping over his words without letting himself think about them, without listening to the creeping awareness in the back of his mind that _this is a mistake_. “What would you do, Shizu-chan, if I were there?” His voice is straining over the words, his tone dropping down into the shadows of seduction; he doesn’t try to retrieve it. “Would you fuck me like you used to?”

“ _God_ ,” Shizuo groans, and Izaya can hear the heat on it now, as if he can see the drag of Shizuo pulling hard over himself in the resonance on that one word. “ _Izaya_.”

“Down against your bed,” Izaya pants, and he’s talking too much, this is a mistake, but: “With your hand on the back of my neck and your fist around my dick? Taking me like an animal, making me come around your cock in me, Shizu-chan, is that what you want?” Shizuo makes a low sound in the back of his throat, something raw and wordless with heat, and Izaya’s breath whimpers out of him before he can help himself. His heart is racing, his hands are shaking; he can almost feel the huff of Shizuo’s breathing against the side of his neck, can almost see the drag of Shizuo’s fingers working fast over the flushed length of his cock. “What are you thinking about?”

“Fuck,” Shizuo groans. “You.” There’s a hiss of breath, an exhale pushed past gritted teeth; Izaya can hear the flex of Shizuo’s legs on the sound, can imagine the sharp upward thrust of the other’s body as he fucks up against the grip of his hand. “ _Izaya_.”

“Yeah,” Izaya says, and his foot is bracing at the edge of his chair, his leg is starting to shake with the need to hold himself steady; he doesn’t even feel the pain of it for how taut the rest of him is drawing. “Would you fuck me against your wall, Shizu-chan?” His voice is creaking, his breathing stalling; his voice is skipping higher with every word, edging closer to incoherency as the friction of his palm drags him nearer to the edge. “Or the door, maybe, so your neighbors could hear the way I’d scream your name?” Shizuo groans, encouragement without words, and Izaya gasps a breath and lets his voice drop off into the lowest register he can muster. “ _Shizu-chan_.” A huff of air, static crackling down the line, and Izaya tries again, taunting this time, lilting over each syllable to turn it syrupy-sweet. “Shizu-chan.”

“Fuck,” Shizuo pants, sounding breathless, sounding undone. “Fuck...fuck you, Izaya.”

“Shizu-chan,” Izaya says again, his voice spilling higher with need; and then, again, as the act takes over, as fantasy becomes reality: “ _Shizu-chan_ , fu _ck_.”

“Izaya,” Shizuo gasps, “ _oh_ ” and then, with a groan far in the back of his throat: “ _Izaya_ ” breaking open into a gasp that speaks as clearly to the shudder of orgasm in him as if Izaya could feel the spill of heat into his own body. Izaya’s breath rushes out of him, his lungs emptying themselves with the relief of the moment; his fingers tighten, his grip speeds, and against his ear Shizuo is panting for air, pleasure still audible in every ragged inhale he takes. Izaya can imagine him lying across his tangled sheets with his hand still around his cock and his come splashed wet across the flat of his stomach and: “ _Ah_ ” Izaya chokes off, and he’s curling forward over the grip of his hand, his shoulders tipping him in to hunch over his lap as his cock twitches and spills over his fingers. His body tremors through a pulse of pleasure, a second, a third; and then the ecstasy eases, the tension unwinds, and Izaya is left with his phone pressed close against his ear and the sound of his own breathing dragging heavy at the microphone.

Neither of them speak for a long moment. Izaya’s heart is still racing with the lingering adrenaline in his veins, his body still quivering with occasional aftershocks of sensation; but he can feel the chill settling in, can feel the weight of reality returning to shiver cold self-consciousness into his veins, to whisper the repercussions of what he’s just done in the back of his mind. Shizuo is still breathing on the other end of the line, his inhales easing as he comes back into himself; and Izaya can taste the too-much honesty of the words he spilled in the midst of his own arousal, can see the rubble of the walls he destroyed with his own unfettered admissions. Cold is spreading through him, freezing him in place where he sits; and then Shizuo takes a breath, and says “Izaya--” and Izaya’s panic does what his desire did before, and seizes control of his tongue and speech at once.

“I have to go,” he says, fast, not caring how desperate he sounds; and he hangs up at once, without waiting for a response from the other end. His heart races as he looks down at the glowing screen of his phone, as he watches the timestamp on the call flash itself to stillness, as his shoulders tense and breathing catches on the possibility of a return call. But his screen dims and then darkens, the call record closing itself after a few seconds of inactivity; and Izaya’s phone stays silent and still in his hand, and after some minutes he reaches out to set it on the desk so he can go to clean himself up. It’s almost fifteen minutes before he comes back for it, and he doesn’t listen for a ring; but there’s no record of a missed call, even when he opens up the log to be sure.

The reassurance doesn’t do as much to calm the rush of his heartbeat as he’d hoped it would.


	10. Self-Aware

Izaya doesn’t think about Shizuo the next morning.

This is not the easy oversight it might seem in theory; it’s not a simple matter of distraction, of turning aside and simply letting his attention slide away from a single point of focus. It’s an effort, a constant struggle, like refusing to give in to an addiction or constantly bearing the weight of some huge anxiety at the back of one’s mind; because Izaya _wants_ to think of Shizuo, left to his own devices his thoughts always, always find their way back home to Ikebukuro, to the color of Shizuo’s hair and the angle of his frown, and right now, this morning, Izaya can’t bear to let that magnetic control settle over him. So he turns aside from it, he takes his consciousness in hand and he steers it elsewhere, and he has to fight for the control and he has to keep holding tight to it but he can do this, he might not be as strong as Shizuo but he’s strong enough to do this one thing at least, and he turns his back on the memory of the night before and on the weight of the past and he pins himself to the present like he’s driving a needle through a butterfly.

He doesn’t know if he’s bored. He can’t let himself think about it; the distance from himself it would require to accurately gauge his emotional state is too much for him to trust himself with, it’s too easy from there to skip sideways to the why and who of his present thoughts, and then he will have broken his own promise to himself. He just acts, simply, like he’s an automaton set to process through the functions of his regular day with neither complaint nor hesitation, and so he does: responding to inquiries, engaging in conversations, adopting a whole handful of personas in quick succession like pulling on a new coat for each conversational partner. There’s no joy in it, no restless unhappiness; just the action, the blank awareness that he is existing and continuing forward over the passage of time, and there would be some comfort to that if he admitted to himself he had feelings about it at all.

Izaya hasn’t decided if he’s going to call again. That requires considering Shizuo’s existence, likely demands that he actually recall some portion of that conversation last night; and that he can’t let himself do, at least not yet, not until he can trust himself to hold himself to some measure of rationality instead of slipping into the heat-induced insanity that surely struck him during their last call. So Izaya has no plans, for the afternoon or the evening or any part of his life beyond this exact moment; he doesn’t think, and he doesn’t scheme, he doesn’t plot or wonder or hypothesize. He just exists, moment to moment, breath to breath, as detached from the future as if every moment might be his last, and he doesn’t think about why that state feels so familiar to him.

His phone rings that afternoon.

This isn’t a particularly remarkable occurrence. Izaya takes and makes calls all day, as needed to collect or distribute information to those people busy enough or desperate enough to pay him for it instead of making an attempt at getting answers themselves; there’s nothing to mark this out as different from any of the other handful of calls that have come and gone so far today with barely so much as a flicker of his attention. But Izaya’s shoulders tense, his breathing catches, his mind goes blank; and he knows before he turns his head to look at the screen who it is calling, knows whose name will be displayed underneath the blank space for an absent picture. He stares at his phone for a long moment, waiting as if time will somehow be enough to calm the rattle of his heart in his chest, as if patience will suddenly prove stronger than panic when it never has before; and then he lifts his hand, and reaches out for his phone, and taps to answers the call before he lifts the receiver to his ear. He doesn’t know what he’s going to say, has no idea what words are going to surface against the blank of his thoughts; and in the end, he finds, he falls back on the inanity that comes easily, at least, if it has no other redeeming qualities. “Hello?”

“Izaya,” Shizuo’s voice says, low and heavy on Izaya’s name. “Hey.” A pause, a heartbeat of hesitation, then: “It’s Shizuo.”

“I know,” Izaya says, because he wants to roll his eyes but he can’t, much less manage any kind of real snap to his response. “I saw on the display.”

“Oh,” Shizuo says. The line goes silent again; Izaya wonders, distantly, if he was meant to say something else, if Shizuo was expecting some other reaction than the perfectly ordinary one he offered. He wonders if he’s supposed to be friendlier, warmer, if he was meant to answer with a smile on his voice and teasing in his throat; he wonders if Shizuo just wants a repeat of the night before, if this is the long-distance equivalent of the old _I-za-ya-kun_ growled into the resonance of a suggestion they both understood even if no one else did. But if it is he doesn’t understand anymore, he’s lost all his fluency in the details of Shizuo’s communication along with the ability to face the angle of his shoulders and the set of his stance; all Izaya has left now is the clumsy weight of more ordinary conversation, the fumbling attempts to make sense of another human being that he never used to need, when he and Shizuo could cut to the simpler context of skin on skin as their preferred means of interaction.

He should say something, he thinks. The line has been silent for some seconds; Izaya isn’t the one who called, this time, but he doesn’t want Shizuo to hang up, doesn’t want the uncertain connection of the line to fall flat and leave him stranded again. He struggles to think, to find some question or comment to offer to encourage Shizuo into speech, and he’s just opening his mouth to ask why the other is calling when Shizuo huffs an exhale against the receiver so hard that the sound of it cuts off Izaya’s words unvoiced.

“I miss you.”

Izaya’s mouth is still open, his lips still parted on that generic encouragement he didn’t have a chance to offer. He doesn’t finish speaking it, doesn’t offer anything in its place; but neither does he close his mouth after the sudden spill of Shizuo’s words at his ear. He can hear the separate pieces of them, can string them together into a sentence that has some ostensible meaning; but with Shizuo’s voice on the sounds the possible interpretation collapses on impossibility, unravels itself into insanity as quickly as Izaya can form it. He’s left staring blankly at the far side of his apartment, his thoughts wiped clear and his breathing stalled in his chest; and Shizuo takes a breath, like he’s come up from some impossible depth of water, and goes on speaking without waiting for Izaya to reply.

“Ikebukuro’s not the same without you.” A huff, a rough exhale; it’s a laugh, Izaya thinks, but one so edged with self-deprecation it’s hard to piece out the amusement under the sound. “Or maybe it is. I dunno. Things aren’t the same for me, anyway. Everything is…” He pauses, hesitating over the word to use. Izaya would offer him suggestions if he still had any ability to speak at all, if he could remember how to use his tongue and lips and lungs to take air into his body and expel it in some kind of coherent noise to be understood by others. Finally Shizuo sighs into surrender. “Quiet. It’s so _quiet_ without you here, I don’t know what to do with myself.” There’s a shift of sound at the other end of the line, the rustle of fabric; Izaya can picture Shizuo leaning forward over his knees, can imagine a hand pushing roughly against the tangle of windswept yellow hair.

“It’s so stupid,” Shizuo says, his voice a little muffled and a little lower than it was. It’s like he’s forgotten about the phone entirely, like he’s almost forgotten about Izaya; his words are for himself, Izaya thinks, more than for the possible listener on the other end of the line. “I spent all those years just wanting you to leave me _alone_ so I could have some peace and quiet and now I _do_ and all I can think about is…” He breaks himself off but the unfinished sentence is clear in the quiet. Izaya thinks he would sell his soul to hear that last word and count himself the better for the trade.

“I miss you,” Shizuo repeats, even more softly than his last spill of words, so low it’s almost a whisper against the receiver of his phone. “I shouldn’t and it’s stupid but I do. Maybe that makes me an idiot, I don’t know. So I’m an idiot. Whatever. It doesn’t change facts.” He sighs again. “The city’s not the same without you here. I wish…” A pause, a long one, enough that Izaya wonders if Shizuo won’t leave this sentence hanging unfinished like the other; but then: “I wish you were still here,” mumbled so softly against the phone that Izaya isn’t completely sure he’s meant to hear it.

Izaya stares at the far wall of his apartment. It’s the same as it’s always been, as blandly familiar as it has become over the months of his occupancy; there’s nothing worth seeing there, nothing to even begin to merit the focus he’s giving it in this moment. But it’s easier to stare at that, easier to fix his attention where it doesn’t belong than to even begin pulling apart the weight of Shizuo’s words, than to figure out how to approach a response to a confession Izaya never expected to hear and doesn’t know how to make sense of. So he stares, and blinks, counting each dip of his lashes with idle attention while he waits for some part of his mind to rise back to coherency from the force of the blow Shizuo has just dealt; or waits for Shizuo’s patience to give way, as it inevitably will, if Izaya’s reaction can’t catch up in time.

It turns out to be the latter. Izaya suspected it would be, vaguely, in the distant part of his mind dedicating itself to making simple predictions and cataloging unnecessary details of this moment, the part that has opted out entirely of the effort that is so swamping the rest of his thoughts; he’s surprised Shizuo gives him as long as he does, as seconds form into the shape of one minute, and then two, as he listens to the sound of the other’s breathing tensing while his own stutters for a rhythm and waits for the explosion. Finally: “Are you even there?” Shizuo growls in some measure of his usual tone, anger pulling his voice back to his more ordinary volume instead of the strange, soft gentleness he had for those few minutes. “If you just left me to say all that to an empty line I--”

“Yes,” Izaya says, and Shizuo’s voice cuts off at once, like just that one soft word is enough to stem all his anger at the source. Izaya’s spine prickles with awareness of that, with the sense of the power that comes with it, with the burden of the responsibility he carries in his throat. He’s not sure he likes it. “I’m listening.”

“Oh,” Shizuo says, sounding uncertain again. “Okay.” There’s a moment of hesitation, presumably while he remembers how to express himself in some means other than growling anger. “Are you...do you want to say anything?”

Izaya shakes his head, the motion involuntary and reflexive even though he knows Shizuo can’t see it and won’t be able to parse the response without words to give it shape. “No,” he says; and then, because that seems insufficient, somehow: “Not yet,” because he’s still struggling to form sense from the clarity of the words Shizuo gave him, still trying to turn the meaning of the other’s statement around in his head into an angle that he can fit within the structure of the world as he has always viewed it. “I need to think.”

Shizuo huffs a breath. “Six months not enough?” but it’s teasing, almost gentle; he doesn’t wait for an answer before he’s continuing. “That’s fine.” There’s the sound of fabric shifting; Izaya can picture Shizuo’s shoulders lifting under the weight of his shirt, can imagine the uncomfortable movement of a shrug. “I don’t really need anything. I just wanted to tell you.” He huffs into the receiver in a brief, crackling spill of sound. “I told you enough about everything else, after all.”

Izaya’s lips curve up at one corner, the expression tugging at his mouth before he’s realized what he’s feeling; it’s only when he lifts a hand to touch his face that he can make sense of it as a smile, if a shaky and weak one. “Yeah.”

Shizuo clears his throat roughly. “That’s all,” he says, sounding a little rough and a little shy. Izaya wonders if he’s flushing, or maybe if he has a hand up to push awkwardly through his hair. “I just wanted to say that one thing.”

Izaya’s smile pulls a little bit wider. He can feel the tension of it building behind his eyes; or maybe that’s a different emotion, maybe that’s the burn of something else fighting with the smile at his mouth for control of him. “No stories of Ikebukuro today?”

“Nah.” Shizuo hesitates; for a moment Izaya wonders if he isn’t going to say something else, if he doesn’t have any other startling admissions to offer on the other end of the line. But then he clears his throat, and the possibility disintegrates like it was never there at all. “I’ll talk to you later, Izaya.”

“Yes.” It feels strange, to agree with Shizuo; Izaya considers the taste of the word on his tongue, lets the sound of it linger for a moment in his mind. “Later, Shizu-chan.” Shizuo huffs an exhale of acknowledgment at the other end of the line, and Izaya draws his phone away from his ear without waiting for the _click_ of flat sound to indicate Shizuo hanging up.

He keeps looking at the far wall of his apartment for some time. His thoughts feel removed, like they’re echoing from a shout some impossible distance away, or like they’re someone else’s more than his own, like he’s watching someone else’s reactions to some too-much revelation. _I miss you_ , Shizuo had said, Shizuo’s voice framing each of the words with perfect clarity; _all I can think about is_ and Izaya can feel the _you_ that went unsaid, can frame it to careful enunciation against the shift of his tongue and the edge of his teeth.

“You’re all I can think about,” he says, carefully, just to hear the sound of the words in the air; and then he feels the weight of his own voice too late, tastes the truth of the statement heavy and dragging at his tongue, and he tips his head back against the support of his chair and lifts his arm to cover whatever expression may be across his face.

He isn’t sure what he’s feeling, but he’s certain he doesn’t want an audience for it, even that of his own self-awareness.


	11. Unstated

“I can’t believe Simon,” Shizuo says, sounding like he’s so close to laughter that Izaya can almost see the curve of his lips onto the flash of a grin, can almost see the way the expression catches the dark of Shizuo’s eyes into something lighter, the weight of the color brightening into hazel, into the beginnings of the same gold that his hair turns under the angle of autumn light. “What possessed him to get between us that first time?”

“‘Fighting is bad,’” Izaya intones in his best Russian accent, dropping his voice heavy against the receiver of his phone until he can feel the force of the words rumbling in his chest. “‘Boys should not fight, fighting is dangerous.’”

Shizuo snorts amusement, as he was meant to. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. I mean I know _why_ he wanted us to stop. But even the teachers were terrified of us, why was he so ready to get in our way? I think I would have gone through him without even realizing he was there if he were someone else.”

Izaya shrugs and leans back into greater comfort against the arm of his couch. “It wouldn’t have surprised me,” he says. “I suppose that’s why he wasn’t frightened, though. I don’t think Simon’s been frightened of anything since he came to Ikebukuro.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo agrees, clearly hearing the obvious force of Izaya’s words and missing their more subtle implications about Simon’s past. “He’s like a wall. Things just hit him and stop.”

“Rather more than that,” Izaya drawls. “I’ve never met a wall that could stop you when you were really fired up, Shizu-chan.”

There was a time when that would have made Shizuo hiss frustration, a time when the reminder of the strength in himself that he finds so abhorrent would have hunched his shoulders on anger and ground his voice down into a threat to hum hot against Izaya’s ears. But now he laughs, the sound sudden and crackling on warmth, and Izaya doesn’t know if it’s Shizuo who has changed or himself but he knows he likes this, at least, even if he hasn’t yet decided if he likes it more than what they used to have.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Shizuo finally admits, without any indication of self-consciousness at voicing even trivial agreement with something Izaya says. “We really were a menace to the city, weren’t we?”

It would be easy to push him into more accuracy, easy to huff and point out that _Izaya_ was hardly the one uprooting street signs and punching through steel girders. Any damage left in the wake of their chases always bore Shizuo’s fingerprints as surely as Izaya’s skin did in the mornings after nights that started in dark alleys and ended in tangled sheets; but there’s something warm to that _we_ in Shizuo’s voice, to the casual camaraderie implied by _us_ , and Izaya isn’t going to fool himself into thinking it’s intentional but neither is he going to deliberately give up the prickle of heat it sends down his spine with every repetition. So instead: “No more than to each other,” he says, steering the conversation sideways as easily as if he can reorient the direction of the wind to guide their sail to safer waters. “Do you still have that scar I gave you the day we met?”

“You fucking asshole,” Shizuo says, which isn’t an answer, but Izaya doesn’t call him out on the lack. “I still can’t believe you pulled a knife on me before I even knew your name.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Izaya tells him. “You knew my name, Shinra had just told you. And don’t make it sound like some attempt on your life, we both know you shrugged it off just like you did getting hit by that truck.”

“Fuck you,” Shizuo tells him, but the words are more casual than heated, like the rhythm of an argument so well-worn both parties have forgotten what they were fighting about in the first place. “Just because I _was_ okay doesn’t mean you knew I would be.”

“That’s what makes it interesting,” Izaya informs him. His mouth is curving onto the beginnings of a smile without his intention; he doesn’t try to repress it any more than he tries to hold the sound of amusement back from his voice. “I never complained about the death threats, you know, Shizu-chan, you could at least offer me the same consideration.”

“I never _touched_ you,” Shizuo growls against the other end of the phone. “You were always too damn fast for me to catch up to, I couldn’t land so much as a punch.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Izaya tells him. “Again. You had _plenty_ of opportunity to do whatever you liked to me on a fairly regularly basis, as I recall.”

“That’s--” Shizuo starts, snapping back a reply that outpaces his thought process; Izaya can tell when his mind stumbles over the implication of Izaya’s words, can parse it with perfect clarity from the sudden break in Shizuo’s speech. There’s a heartbeat of time, a moment for Izaya to grin victory up at the ceiling of his apartment; and then, in a much softer tone than he was using before, “Jesus, Izaya, it’s not like I was going to hit you once we were…”

“Having sex?” Izaya suggests, since Shizuo’s self-consciousness seems to have cut off the flow of his words. “I know. It was always nice to know all I had to do to save myself if you backed me into a corner was show a little skin and your animal instincts would override your aggressive ones.”

“Shut up,” Shizuo says, his voice hot with a blend of what Izaya thinks is self-consciousness and the start of arousal. Izaya hopes that’s what it is, anyway; he’d hate to end up jerking off all on his own. “That’s not...you wanted it just as much, don’t act like that was just a tool.”

“Mm,” Izaya hums, letting the sound drop off into a vague, noncommittal noise. “Maybe it was.” And then, fast, before Shizuo can wind himself up into anger again: “Or maybe the fighting was the means to the end instead. Did you ever consider that possibility?”

Shizuo huffs a breath that’s not quite a laugh and not quite a purr. Izaya can feel it like a hand at the back of his neck, like fingers brushing aside the weight of his hair to skim against the knob of bone at the top of his spine. “You couldn’t have just asked for a date instead?”

Izaya shrugs, not caring that Shizuo can’t see the motion. “Simon took care of that for us anyway,” he says lightly, as if he doesn’t care, as if the framework of that one word isn’t far harder for him to bear in his own mind than all the rough use he ever took at Shizuo’s hands. “Besides, you were always sexier when you were angry.”

Shizuo snorts. “Masochist.”

Izaya smiles. “Maybe,” he says. “I don’t hear you complaining. Or do you want to pretend that you didn’t know full well what would happen every time you chased me across the city?”

Izaya is angling them towards heat, steering the path of their conversation towards the darker parts of memory, towards details left fragmented by desperation and desire coursing hotter even than the connection they chose to call hatred out of some unstated mutual understanding to not look at it too closely. It’s a simple thing, to guide their reminiscing towards the give of sheets and the gasp of overheated breathing, to stir Shizuo to heat to match the speeding rush of Izaya’s own heartbeat; Izaya is already reaching for the hem of his shirt, working his fingers up under the fabric as he thinks about Shizuo’s palms dragging hard against the shift of his breathing, as he thinks about the weight of Shizuo’s hips pressing his legs into the wide angle of surrender for the other’s body. He’s going harder inside his jeans, the heat of the past warming his blood in the present; and then Shizuo takes a breath, and says “Not every time,” and all Izaya’s arousal dies as if Shizuo’s words carry the icy bite of winter on them.

He doesn’t need to ask. There’s no need for clarification, not when Izaya feels the ache of his injured body with every breath he takes, not with the memory of Shizuo’s face set hard on distant determination so much worse than the heat of his usual anger still haunting what dreams Izaya can form from the shadows of unrestful sleep. It’s always there between them, clear in the distance imposed between Izaya’s voice and Shizuo’s, audible in the faint whisper of static against Izaya’s ear and visible in the blank walls around him that still don’t feel like home, even after months of residence within in. Izaya’s hand stills against his stomach, his fingers falling slack against the tension of his body, and he would swear he can feel the tremor of adrenaline run down the length of his arm, would swear he can feel the shake of panic start at the tips of his fingers.

They’re both silent for a long moment. Izaya wonders if it will always be like this, if the almost-peace they have constructed over calls in the last few days with recollections of the past warm with amusement or hot with desire will always be so sharply cut off by the reminder of that last fight, of the line Izaya drew and told Shizuo to step over, of the swing of a fist clenched tight on meaningless threats made suddenly real by Izaya’s own insistence. It had been necessary, at the time; Izaya can still remember too-clearly the panic that hit him when he first saw the pretty blonde at Shizuo’s side, can remember with agonizing clarity that sense of horror that told him all at once that his feelings were far beyond the casual flirtation they was always meant to stay. He couldn’t stay in the city, he couldn’t go on surviving on the fragments of desire he could win from Shizuo when he could see the possibility of his own unmaking right in front of him; and so he drove himself out of Ikebukuro with the blunt force of Shizuo’s true anger, forced Shizuo into a rage enough to unmake everything they had been to each other, all the fragile, unspoken truces they had constructed over years of overheated interludes and desperate touches. He had intended to unmake himself as well -- death would have been an easy way to escape the weight of realization bearing down on him, if nothing else -- but he survived after all, and distance has done what it can to keep Izaya’s thought away from Ikebukuro, and away from Shizuo, and away from the too-much awareness those bring with them. It’s his own fault for looking back, for letting himself draw too close to the heat of Shizuo’s words even dulled over the necessity of the phone at his ear; and so Izaya sits in silence, listening to the sound of Shizuo breathing on the other end of the line and wondering if this will be the time that the wax of his Icarusian wings melts at last.

Finally Shizuo sighs, a heavy sound against the receiver, and Izaya shuts his eyes, feeling relief settle in to ease the strain in his chest even before Shizuo mumbles “Sorry,” so softly against the phone Izaya can barely hear the word. “You don’t want to talk about that, do you?”

Izaya’s mouth tugs on a smile in spite of himself, affection and self-deprecation fighting for control of his thoughts but at least agreeing on the expression of emotion at his lips. “You’re always more perceptive than I give you credit for, Shizu-chan.”

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what makes you shut down,” Shizuo says gruffly. “It would be easier if I didn’t have to guess all the time.” It’s almost a plea, very nearly a request; but Izaya doesn’t answer, and Shizuo doesn’t wait for more than a breath before he continues. “Do you want me to go?”

 _No_ , Izaya wants to say, but he can’t give the rejection voice, can’t draw that near to an admission of how desperately he wants to keep listening to Shizuo’s words purring against his ear; it’s another one of the unspoken rules, the tenets they maneuvered into over nearly a decade together falling back into place now over the few days of phone calls they’ve had like they were never absent at all, like Izaya never shattered them like the blown glass they sometimes felt. He takes a breath instead, clears his throat with deliberate volume, and when he speaks it’s clear and crystalline, the words sharp with an imitation of his old teasing even if they lack the reality of it. “Do you remember the fight you got into on White Day, back at Raijin?” It’s throwing them back years, skipping back to the start, before the constant ache in Izaya’s body and before Shizuo’s grin dulled to the flat frustration that hurt so much more than his anger ever could; back to the unseen corners of the school library, and the shade of leaves coming in on the cherry trees to cast curtains of shadow around them, to the huff of laughter and the drag of fingers and Shizuo ducking his head for kisses Izaya gave as freely as his taunts, without the weight of age and bitter experience that clings to his tongue now.

Shizuo sighs. Izaya doesn’t know if it’s amusement, or frustration, or resignation; he doesn’t think about it, doesn’t try to parse out the details of the sound, because Shizuo is answering, trying for a casual tone he nearly achieves, or at least close enough to it that Izaya isn’t about to complain. “You mean the time you set me up for a confession that turned into me fighting an entire gang at once?”

“Bloody White Day,” Izaya sighs with put-upon nostalgia on his tone. “Were we ever so young?”

Shizuo huffs a laugh. “Hey,” he says, and he sounds like himself now, he’s managed to shake off the temporary strain of self-consciousness from his voice. “Speaking of you being a dick.”

Izaya grins. “Oo, flattery. Do go on, Shizu-chan.”

“That love letter I got.” Shizuo sounds focused, now; Izaya can imagine the set of the frown at his lips as he pursues this new line of thought with single-minded dedication. “I’ve always wondered. Did you get someone else to write it for you, or…”

“Ah.” Izaya lifts his right hand from his stomach, holds it up to consider the silhouette of his fingers against the light. “The confession, yes. I remember that now.” He spreads his fingers wide, turns them sideways to stripe shadow across his face. “Did you know that I’m left-handed?”

“What?” Shizuo sounds lost, taken aback by what must seem to him an abrupt change in topic. “No. You are?”

“I am,” Izaya confirms. “I taught myself to write with either hand. You never know when you’ll want to disguise your handwriting.” He lets his hand drop to his stomach again and smiles up into the light. “I agonized over that phrasing, you know, Shizu-chan.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Shizuo groans, and Izaya dissolves into a giggle against the phone as Shizuo huffs resignation into the receiver. “I _knew_ it.”

They keep the line open for almost an hour after that, rambling over memories of the past scuffed soft and smooth with familiarity like they’re kicking pebbles back and forth across a sidewalk to each other; but Izaya doesn’t really listen, doesn’t really have to think about the casual ease of the conversation as it spills from him to Shizuo and back again. He can gaze up at the ceiling of his apartment, and let his mind wander, and appreciate the simple pleasure of Shizuo’s voice pressing so close against his ear.

It’s easy to follow the rules of their interaction as long as Izaya doesn’t look at them too closely. He has years of experience of turning aside, after all.


	12. Expectations

Izaya is getting spoiled by the phone calls.

He knows he is. It’s not just the reminiscing about the past, with the rough edges worn away to soft curves by the passage of time and the drag of Shizuo’s voice in his ear; it’s not just the sound of another voice on the other end of a phone line, the lull of another human presence to pull him down towards relaxation at the end of the day, when his shoulders are hunched tight on the stress of too many hours in front of his computer. Either of those would be bad enough on their own, or even together; but Izaya thinks he could handle that, could at least convince himself he didn’t need it, didn’t crave it, that he could give up the casual phone calls at any time.

It’s the phone sex that’s the real problem.

Izaya can’t help himself. He knows he shouldn’t, knows he ought to keep the conversations to safer topics of discussion and ought to limit their nostalgia to the heat of aggression instead of the purr of arousal; it was exactly this that drove him to that last fight, after all, exactly this sense of unfettered need that brought him to such panicking heights that he finally had to tear himself away bodily, like an addict turning himself in for forced rehabilitation. And now he’s slipping down the same path again, surrendering to the ache of desire that forms itself low in his stomach with the sound of Shizuo’s voice at his ear with a self-destructive predictability that he would find amusing, if it were in someone other than himself. But he can’t stop, can’t make himself stop calling and can’t stop answering Shizuo’s calls, and once he has the rumble of Shizuo’s laugh at his ear and the gold-washed memories of the past in his mind it’s all too easy to draw them sideways, to dip his voice into flirtation and his words into innuendo and draw Shizuo into arousal as surely as he used to urge him into the shadows of darkened alleys or the seclusion of abandoned buildings. It’s impossible to resist the pull of his own desire once he can hear Shizuo’s breathing catching at his ear, once he can picture the shudder of Shizuo’s body flushing warm under the friction of the other’s grip on himself; and in the end Izaya finds himself gasping pleasure into the phone night after night, his body trembling with the relief he only ever finds with Shizuo’s voice at his ear, now.

It’s nostalgia, sometimes. Between them Izaya thinks they could call up dozens of interludes from the realms of memory, could relive moments from their past over and over again until the edges wore off to threadbare comfort; they could do as they do in their less heated conversations, and keep carefully within the lines of memory without venturing out into any kind of questions or commentary about the present. And they do, there have been nights they did nothing but tumble backwards years into the past to gasp themselves into pleasure as much remembered as experienced in the present; but this is where the rules break down, where Izaya’s ever-fragile grasp on what he _should_ do so often gives way to what he craves instead, and it’s him as often as Shizuo who shifts the verbs into present tense, into _would_ s instead of _did_ s, into the realm of imagination instead of its near-sister memory.

Izaya doesn’t remember which of them it was, tonight. So often it feels like a joint effort, as seamless a transition as they used to have from conversation to fighting; and just at the moment, he’s a little too caught up in the consequences of that surrender to bother with picking apart the details of its start.

“Right there on your couch, Shizu-chan?” he’s saying now, letting his mouth tug onto a grin he knows will be audible while he trails his fingers down against his length, stirring the heat in his veins to greater resistance with the play of his touch while he shuts his eyes to reality and lets himself drift over into imagination instead. “What do you have against beds?”

“Nothing,” Shizuo growls, his voice dropping into that low, gravelly range he always takes on with the heat in his veins, like he can’t keep his tone steady for the arousal spiking high in him. “I’d take you back to bed after.”

“Mm,” Izaya purrs. “After what, exactly?” He tightens his fingers against the base of his cock, draws up in a deliberately slow tug against the ache of want in the back of his head. “After you bent me over your coffee table and fucked me till I screamed?”

Shizuo makes an incoherent sound, like a groan and a growl at once; Izaya can almost see the buck of the other’s hips that comes with that, that drives the hot length of Shizuo’s cock up against the drag of his hand. His grin pulls wider, curling hard at the corner of his mouth; but: “No,” Shizuo says, and Izaya has to shut his eyes to brace himself against whatever is coming next. “I wouldn’t fuck you, Izaya.”

“Aww,” Izaya whimpers, making more of a show of the sound than he feels, with his skin prickling hot with interest over the implication of Shizuo’s words. “Come on, Shizu-chan, don’t you want me anymore?” He only asks because he knows the answer, knows beyond a doubt how Shizuo will respond; and he’s rewarded immediately by a hiss of breathing, by the rush of Shizuo’s exhale coming hard past his teeth.

“Yeah,” Shizuo says against the phone, the admission coming without the least attempt at dismissal or understatement; it makes Izaya’s body flush with heat, with the renewed confirmation that Shizuo’s desire is as simple and direct as it has always been. “But I like you better when you’re falling apart before I’m even inside you.” There’s the sound of Shizuo shifting at the other end of the line; Izaya wonders if he’s on the aforementioned couch now, if he’s sprawled across the soft of it in an echo of Izaya’s own position on his own, or if he’s in bed with his knees angled wide over the sheets, or just leaning back against the inside of his door or the wall of his kitchen, any one of the places Izaya can call up with more clarity than he can remember the inside of his own bedroom here in this unfamiliar city. “I’d get your clothes off you and get my head between your legs.”

“I didn’t know you were into rimming, Shizu-chan,” Izaya drawls, deliberately misinterpreting the implication Shizuo is angling for. “You should have told me so, I wouldn’t mind letting you eat me out.”

Izaya’s expecting Shizuo to balk at this, is expecting a hiss of irritation and a sharp correction he can laugh at even as he strokes himself closer to relief; but “Sure,” Shizuo says instead, and Izaya’s the one hissing, now, biting back the edge of a groan as his cock twitches harder against the grip of his hand. “It’d be easier to open you up that way. Would you like that, Izaya?”

Izaya would. He can call up a perfect image of it: Shizuo’s head pressing close between his thighs, the hot flex of Shizuo’s tongue dragging against him, working gentle pressure to urge him open in spite of any resistance he might attempt; Shizuo sliding forward into him, slick-wet heat stretching him open so Shizuo can lick into the tension of his body, so Shizuo can taste him from the inside out. He can feel arousal spiking up his spine, can feel it aching deep in his balls as his cock swells hotter against his touch; but he keeps his mouth shut until he thinks he can trust himself to speak, and when he does it’s with the most disinterested tone he can muster. “It would be convenient, sure. Are you saying you wouldn’t even bother with lube?”

“I’d get there,” Shizuo says with a kind of languid unconcern that Izaya can feel like a knot of want tightening low in his stomach. “After I had you begging me for it.”

“Please,” Izaya says at once, letting his voice break over an edge into a lilting, teasing plea that he hopes sounds put-on enough to hide the rising desire twisting itself tighter in him with every breath. “Please, Shizu-chan, your fingers inside me is all I’ve ever wanted.”

Shizuo huffs a laugh, the sound an outline of amusement pulled taut over want. “Yeah?”

“Mm,” Izaya hums, and he lets some of the heat spill against his lips, this time, lets the sound purr warm against his tongue. “Remember that time you fingerfucked me until I came all over my window?”

“Fuck,” Shizuo groans. “Like that, yeah. I’d get two fingers up into you--”

“Three,” Izaya says, at once.

Shizuo hisses a breath. “You can’t _take_ three.”

“I can take your dick,” Izaya reminds him. “Give me three, Shizu-chan, see what kind of sounds you can get me to make.” Shizuo groans, the sound low and resonant with want, and Izaya can see it as clearly as if he’s back in Ikebukuro, as if he’s standing in front of Shizuo and watching the other’s grip flex hard around the flush of his cock in involuntary reaction to the heat of his own imagination. “Is that what you’d want, to get me off just around your fingers?” He takes a breath, dips his voice down into the most petulant whine he can muster. “Since you don’t want to fuck me.”

“I _do_ ,” Shizuo says immediately, like he was supposed to, and Izaya shudders an exhale at the raw want so clear on the other’s tone. “I do, I want to feel you coming around me.”

“So do it,” Izaya tells him. “I’d hardly complain, you know how I--”

“I would,” Shizuo growls, his voice dropping off an edge as he talks right over Izaya’s taunting lilt, and Izaya shudders through his whole body, his cock jerking at the image of Shizuo leaning over him with that one statement, of Shizuo driving forward into him to replace the strain of his fingers with the thrust of his cock instead. Izaya’s sure his breathing is audible, is sure Shizuo can hear the catch of desire rising hot in his throat, but Shizuo doesn’t stop talking even to listen to him; he’s speaking faster if anything, tumbling over his words rapidfire like they’re rising to his lips as quickly as the heat is rising in his body. “I know, Izaya, I know how you like it, with your arms pinned up over your head and your legs spread open for me.” Izaya’s breath catches, his shoulders flex; he can almost feel the print of Shizuo’s fingers at his wrists, can almost feel that casual, one-handed hold that is always enough to lock both his hands to stillness no matter how he struggles. “You like it slow, right? Deep and hard and slow, until you’re shaking from how bad you want me to let you come.”

“Oh god,” Izaya says, and there’s no space for illusion now, his hand is moving too fast, his breathing is coming too hard, his imagination is sparking too hot with the images Shizuo’s voice is crafting for him. “Oh, fuck, Shizu-chan.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says, his voice steady, low, rumbling down in the depths of his chest until Izaya can feel it like a touch, like the vibration of the other’s voice is enough all alone to unravel the tension in his body and leave him gasping breathless against the support of the couch under him. “Like that, Izaya, when I can take my time with you enough to really take you apart.” He hisses through a breath, his voice catching in the back of his throat to crackle static against the phone. “I could always tell when you were getting desperate from the way you felt tensing around me, you know.”

Izaya makes a weak sound, more desperate than he’d like, more heated than he intended; but Shizuo just groans response, the sound so reflexive for a moment it’s like he really is there, like the ache in Izaya’s legs is from the press of another’s body against them, like the rhythm of his hand over himself is the promised patient unmaking Shizuo always gave him with the solid weight of his body and the unwavering pace of his thrusts. His stamina was always inhuman at times like that; Izaya wonders, in the dizzy way of fleeting thoughts that come in the midst of arousal, how many times Shizuo could get him off before he let himself come, wonders how much use his body could take before it truly became too much, before his half-joking pleas for reprieve took on the tenor of sincerity in his throat. But it doesn’t matter anyway, like it never used to matter, because:

“You liked it,” Izaya manages, gasping over the words as his hand speeds over himself, as he tries and fails to fight back the urge to tilt his hips up to meet his grip, to thrust against his palm as quickly as he pulls up over himself. “Feeling how good you make me feel, how much I liked the way your cock moved in me.” Shizuo groans, heat without words, and Izaya gasps an overheated inhale and goes on speaking, feeling his coherency starting to collapse as his grasp on the past begins to bleed and merge into the present, reality and fantasy spilling over each other until everything is heat, everything is that steady-rising pleasure spreading up his spine and tightening low in his stomach. “I do, Shizu-chan, I love it, I love the way you fuck me, hard and rough or slow and deep.” Shizuo chokes on an inhale, like his throat is closing up for the heat in his veins, and Izaya keeps talking, filling in the silence left by Shizuo’s rising desire with his own excessive speech. “I want it, I _need_ it, I need you Shizu-chan, please, I want your hands on my body, I want you to pull me back and take me while I’m still in the middle of coming all over your fingers and your stupid fucking couch.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Shizuo groans, sounding raw and wanting and desperate, like Izaya’s words are pulling the sound bodily out of him. “ _Izaya_.”

“I want to feel you,” Izaya goes on, all but babbling as the words come up his throat, as his legs flex into pain against his couch and his hand moves faster, harder, seeking out an approximation of Shizuo’s grip that’s never quite strong enough, never quite certain enough. “The way your hands fit at my hips, the way you move into me, the way your skin sticks to mine. The way you feel when--” as his voice breaks, as his spine arches. “--when you’re coming into me, god, Shizu-chan, I--”

“Izaya,” Shizuo says again, like Izaya has stolen all the rest of his coherency, like he’s incapable of offering anything but just that. “ _Izaya_.”

“Oh fuck,” Izaya says, “I’m going to come” and he does, his body arching sharply off the couch as his throat opens up into a moan so hot with want it sounds like a sob against the receiver of his phone. The pleasure rushes through him like a physical blow, each full-body tremor spasming through the strain of his body like it’s a punch slamming into the knot of heat in his stomach; and at his ear he can hear Shizuo choke off a breath, can hear the strained gasp that comes from the depths of his chest and speaks to his own orgasm spilling in time with Izaya’s. The thought alone is enough to send another shudder through Izaya’s body, to pull another pulse of heat from his cock in the grip of his hand; and then he’s left lying slack and heavy across his couch, his breathing coming hard and his skin flushed to heat that he doesn’t bother trying to cool. It’s nice to linger with it, for a moment, to imagine that the radiance of desire clinging to him is borrowed from someone else’s skin, that the exhausted weight of his body is from the press of another form atop him instead of just the natural consequence of the force of the orgasm he just drew from himself. He keeps his eyes shut, keeps his phone to his ear, and listens to the sound of Shizuo panting through the aftershocks of his own pleasure and into the strange almost-peace they can only ever find between them in moments like this, with all the vicious want in them spilled sticky across flushed skin.

Izaya can hear the breath Shizuo takes at the other end of the line. It’s a deliberate thing, weighted with intention even before he speaks; Izaya wonders vaguely what he could possibly have to say, wonders how much coherency Shizuo can reasonably muster with his whole body surely as unwound on the satisfaction of physical release as Izaya’s own.

“Izaya.” Soft, that, strangely gentle with the care Shizuo puts into framing the syllables. “I want to see you again.”

Izaya’s breath catches, his heart seizes in his chest. Shizuo sounds calm, intent, _sincere_ ; and Izaya can’t run, can’t escape the force of those words, can’t retreat from the rush of adrenaline that surges through him in the wake of his understanding. He can feel his coherency disintegrating, can feel rationality collapsing to the unstoppable force of panic; and since he can’t physically retreat, he does the next best thing, and breaks off the connection of the call.

He lies staring at the ceiling for long minutes after, waiting for his heart to ease its frantic rhythm, waiting for his rationality to reform, waiting for the reality he’s made for himself to regain some measure of substance instead of the soap-bubble fragility it seems to have right now, and he’s almost, but not quite, glad that his phone doesn’t ring again.


	13. Heard

Izaya makes it off the couch eventually. His skin is going clammy with the liquid drying sticky on his fingers and against his stomach, and it doesn’t take much for his physical discomfort to stir him into motion that his mental incoherence would find it impossible to achieve alone. He moves steadily, neither rushing nor delaying, working himself through the process of getting to the bathroom and washing his skin clean of the evidence of pleasure and the sheen of sweat alike without thinking about much of anything at all. It’s an easy process, one made familiar by years of repetition and more immediate practice over the last week; Izaya doesn’t have to think about his movement, or his actions, or anything beyond the immediate reality of water running warm over his hands and washing his skin clean of any trace of the relief that feels like a distant memory even as his legs are still shaky with the force of the orgasm that surged through him. It’s soothing, almost, certainly more of a comfort than the alternative; but it only takes a few minutes, and then he’s emerging from the bathroom again, and coming back across his apartment as if he’s being pulled on a line.

He left his phone on the coffee table alongside the couch, turned up so he can see the screen as he approaches. The notification light is blinking, a crimson lighthouse warning of danger at some impossible distance away; but when Izaya picks up his phone and unlocks the screen there’s not the missed call his chest tightens to think of. There’s just a message, a single line of text that opens up across the screen as he taps on it; he doesn’t think about reading it, doesn’t have to decide if he wants to take in the information. It’s in his head as soon as he glances at it, habit too quick for him to stop himself from skimming the full line of text at a glance before it’s done.

_Did you listen to my messages?_

The question doesn’t make any sense. Izaya might have read it at a glance, may have technically understood the shape of the inquiry; but he has his phone in his hand right now, he can see perfectly well the absence of any pending voicemail. Does Shizuo mean future messages, is he displaying an uncharacteristic sense of poetical phrasing? Is he implying that he already knows Izaya won’t listen to him even if he calls, does he mean it as some kind of passive-aggressive attack on Izaya’s unwillingness to communicate directly? Izaya can think of a dozen things Shizuo might mean, all of them unnecessarily complex and more in keeping with his own style of interaction than Shizuo’s direct approach; and it’s then that he realizes that he missed the obvious explanation, the reference so straightforward that he skipped right over it while Shizuo didn’t consider it to even need clarifying.

It takes him some time to find his old phone. He had collected it from the floor an embarrassing amount of time after his first desperate separation of battery from frame, had stuffed it away to be forgotten while thinking about what he was doing as little as possible. At the time this was completely reasonable, or at reasonable as Izaya thinks he could have been expected to behave under the circumstances; now it just means tracking it down again takes far longer than it ought. He spends a half hour rummaging through the shadowy corners of his closet looking for it before finally remembering opening the drawer on his desk and returning back out to the living room to pull open the heavy wooden drawer. It draws smoothly for the first foot; the last few inches are harder to get to, with the way the desk is aligned with the wall close behind it and the demands made by the width of Izaya’s wheelchair. That’s why the phone ended up here, Izaya remembers now, as he fits his hand into the gap to fish it free; somewhere he won’t ever see by accident, where he could forget about it with the same dedicated attention he spent forgetting Ikebukuro.

It’s apt, in a way, to have this effort prove as futile as the first.

The phone is in better condition than Izaya honestly expected it to be. The battery snaps into place without much protest, in spite of his rough use of it during his last call, and the whole thing powers back up to the touch of a button, willing to offer the comfortable glow of its backlit screen as soon as Izaya asks for it. He waits through the startup time, working the edge of his teeth against his lower lip without really thinking about it; and then the screen is on, the neutral background comes into view, and Izaya taps into calling his voicemail without waiting for the device to catch up with whatever missed notifications he has.

He’s expecting a message, perhaps two; he never used this phone much for business, and everyone who contacts him regularly has far better ways of reaching out to him. But when the voicemail finally comes alive it’s to tell him he has “ _four unheard messages,_ ” and Izaya can feel his eyebrows raise even before the electronic voice goes on to announce: “ _First unheard message. March 17th, 6:12pm._ ”

“ _IZAYA_ ” and it’s loud, the sound so resonant with fury Izaya flinches back as soon as he hears it, cringing away from the roar of anger against his ear. “ _I should have_ known _it was you, it’s_ always _you, I should have never answered that call. What are you plotting now? Are you coming back to the city? If you come back to Ikebukuro I swear to god I won’t let you leave alive, Izaya, don’t you_ dare _come back._ ”

The phone beeps, offering calm electronic punctuation to the spill of Shizuo’s incoherent rage against the phone. Izaya takes a breath, feels it shaking over the adrenaline running to heat in his chest. The voice speaks again. “ _Next unheard message. March 17th, 6:16pm_.”

“ _Fuck you_ ,” Shizuo’s voice starts this time, only fractionally calmer than the blind fury of the first message. “ _Fuck_ you _, Izaya, what the_ fuck _is wrong with you? I thought I was talking to a stranger this whole time and you’ve just been listening to the details of my day? What are you even going to do with that, it’s not as if there’s anything secret about the way I live my life._ ” A pause, a breath of hesitation. “ _Why aren’t you picking up?_ ”

Another beep. “ _March 17th, 7:30pm_.”

“ _Sorry. Maybe. Is this even you? Am I just yelling into some stranger’s voicemail?_ ” A laugh, heavy and not particularly amused; Izaya’s breath catches in his chest. It’s hard to fill his lungs. “ _That’s bullshit. I know it was you. I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out before. I should have, probably. I used to be able to smell you in the air, seems like I should at least be able to recognize your breathing or something._ ” A heavy sigh, weighted with something Izaya can’t parse except as a crackle of static. “ _You turned your phone off, didn’t you? You’re not even going to hear this. Whatever. I’m...I’m sorry._ ”

“ _Next unheard message_ ,” electronic neutrality offers. Izaya’s shoulders are shaking. He thinks he would be crying, if he had the attention to spare to notice anything about his mental state beyond the tremors of adrenaline running through him from aching legs to tense fingertips. “ _March 18th, 2:14am_.”

“ _Izaya_.” Shizuo’s voice sounds strange, softer than Izaya’s ever heard it before, or maybe heavier, like Izaya’s name is some lead weight pulling it down to the center of the earth. “ _You’re not going to listen to this. I don’t know how to get in touch with you. Maybe you’ll vanish again, like you did last time after…_ ” The voice breaks off for a moment. “ _It doesn’t matter. You won’t hear this anyway._ ” A sigh, long and heavy and exhausted.

“ _I miss you_.” A simple statement, to carry such weight; Izaya can feel it like a fist around his heart, as if Shizuo from the past has reached forward to drag him bodily back to him. “ _Everything is wrong without you here. I thought I would be happier alone but I’m not. I miss you all the time, the color of your hair and the way your laugh sounds and the way you feel against me_.” A shaky inhale; Izaya can sympathize. He can’t remember what ordinary breathing feels like.

“ _This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done_ ,” Shizuo’s voice sighs, echoing forward from the past, dragged ragged on the exhaustion that comes with a sleepless night of too-much emotion. “ _Izaya. I think I might love yo--_ ”

The beep sounds piercingly loud in Izaya’s ear. “ _End of messages_ ,” the electronic speaker informs him. “ _You have no unheard messages._ ”


	14. Hesitation

It’s nearly dawn by the time Izaya reaches for his phone again.

He’s been sitting at his desk with the drawer still open in front of him and his old phone in his hand, or his lap, or pressed to his ear as he listens to the recording of Shizuo’s messages, over and over and over like that might strip some of the weight from them, like the impact of the other’s words might hit him less like a blow if he leans far enough into it. By the time the hours shift to mark the passing of one day into another Izaya thinks he could echo back the cadence of Shizuo’s voice in the recordings, thinks he could match pitch and intonation word-for-word until it would only be the higher range of his own voice keeping him from impersonating Shizuo precisely; but it doesn’t make a difference, except that now he can replay them in his head instead of at his ear, can hear that admission cut off too late to sap any of the emotional strength the phrase bears. Izaya sits in silence for almost an hour, his hands open in his lap and his old phone cradled between his fingers as his thoughts range far afield, as his attention scatters and reforms into new patterns, new shapes, a new person; and then he lifts the speaker back to his ear again, and replays the recording once more, and feels his tentative structure shatter anew.

There is no stability for him. Maybe there never was. Izaya is beginning to think, now, that whatever routine he told himself he found was an illusion at best, a thin framework laid over some endless void ready to tear apart and leave him in free-fall at the first sign of strain. It reminds him of the way he felt when he left Ikebukuro, with all the fragments of the life he had made scattered around him like shards of glass, like the shattered bones marked with the other part of Shizuo Izaya let himself carry out of the city. It’s absurd, he thinks now, as the hours slide past unmarked by any of his own attention, that he ever thought he could leave Shizuo behind; it’s impossible, it was always an illusion of independence, as thin as his own idea of leaving who he was behind and escaping from the past he can no longer even attempt to run from. He’s not even sure, now, that he wants to, not sure that he _ever_ wanted to; it was a necessity, it seems, or it felt like such in the past, like one of those essential components of his existence too firm and solid to even bother questioning. But now Shizuo’s voice is echoing in his thoughts, Shizuo’s words are resonating in his ears: _I think I might--_ and Izaya can’t think, can’t remember how to be himself with the power of those words to unravel him with every breath he takes.

He thinks about it for a long time. It’s not a structured logical process, not a sorting through of pros and cons and weighing his options; there’s no action to this, no conscious effort required. It’s just a matter of holding still, of letting the present wash over him, of letting reality break through the dam Izaya has always made of his perception and drag him down to some endless depth of truth that he never even thought existed. He sits, and he thinks, and he listens and listens and listens again; and finally, with the sky out his window lightening to daybreak pale, he reaches for his new phone still lying silent against the edge of his desk, and opens up the message log.

Shizuo hasn’t texted him again. There was no call, no further attempt at communication; Izaya is grateful to that, in a distant way, even as he wonders what Shizuo must be thinking, with the hours-long delay in any kind of reply. Does he think Izaya is ignoring him, does he think Izaya turned off his phone after his last message? Or does he know, somehow, in that same way he knew Izaya’s voice from the sound of a single unwary inhale, can he feel the adrenaline trembling in Izaya’s grip on his phone like an echo running down some unseen but all-too-real connection? Izaya wonders, thinking about his curiosity so he doesn’t have to think about what he’s typing, so he doesn’t have to face the reality of what he’s sending Shizuo; and then he taps _Send_ , and he has to set his phone down in his lap alongside his old one to keep from dropping it from fingers gone helplessly weak with the panic spiking sharply in him.

There’s not much of a wait, in spite of the hour of the night. There’s something to be said for that, the same thing said by that electronic voice Izaya has heard uncounted times now, “ _2:14am_ ” carrying the implication of a sleepless night of introspection as clearly as the weight of Shizuo’s voice on those few words he offered to the uncaring beep of Izaya’s voicemail. Izaya doesn’t know if Shizuo has slept as little as Izaya has, or if he has woken early from the restlessness of impatient dreams, or if he kept his phone close to him to wake to the sound of Izaya’s incoming message. It hardly matters in any case; the result is that Izaya’s heart is still racing when his phone hums in his lap, the screen lighting up with the notification of an incoming call while his hands are still trembling against the support of his wheelchair.

It takes him a moment to answer. Part of this is his hands; he doesn’t dare move quickly and risk knocking his phone to the floor, or accidentally hanging up the call with an incautious touch against the screen. But mostly it’s because his movements are slow, his entire body moving as if through syrup that has slowed the passage of his own time to a crawl while leaving everything else untouched, until by the time he actually has his phone in his grasp and his thumb over the _Answer_ button he’s faintly surprised the call hasn’t gone to voicemail yet. There’s a pause of silence, a gap for his heart to skip and his throat to tense; and then another ring begins, and Izaya taps to answer before it’s completed the tone.

Shizuo doesn’t wait for a greeting. Izaya supposes they’re past that, now. “Izaya.” His voice is steady, unflinching more than exhausted; if he’s lacking sleep, it’s impossible to tell from his tone. “You got my messages.”

“You got my text,” Izaya says, as the closest thing to an answer he has it in him to offer. He doesn’t want to talk about Shizuo’s voicemails. He isn’t ready to deal with that in real time. He wonders if he’ll ever be ready.

“Yeah.” Shizuo’s voice shifts; Izaya can picture him pulling the phone away from his ear to frown attention at the text message in front of him. “That’s the name of a train station, isn’t it?”

Izaya shuts his eyes and takes a deep, deliberate inhale. “Yes.”

Shizuo’s exhale is loud at the phone. “Is that where you are?”

Izaya tightens his free hand against the weight of his other phone in his lap, feels the curve of the plastic fitting against the tension of his palm like the handle of the knife he might have held in its place, once. “Yes.”

There’s a pause. Izaya counts the rhythm of his heart pounding in his throat, flexing his fingers in turn to mark the beats. He runs out of fingers before Shizuo speaks again. “I can take next weekend off.”

Izaya’s breath spills out of him in a rush, his exhale so sudden and uncontrolled that it drags to static at the receiver of his phone. “I’ll meet you at the station.”

“Okay.” There’s another gap; of speech, of time, of thought. “Thank you.”

Izaya presses his lips together and swallows hard, forcing the motion against the knot in his throat. “I’ll see you then,” he says, and then he has to pull the phone away from his ear and hang up the call before Shizuo says anything else.

Izaya doesn’t know how to deal with the sound of sincerity in Shizuo’s voice.


	15. Connected

Izaya is waiting when Shizuo’s train arrives.

He’s been at the station for almost an hour. He arrived early, well before any possibility of Shizuo beating him to the stop; it gave him time to gauge the space, to find the best corner to tuck himself behind while he waits for the time to pass. He had thought to browse forums on his phone, or maybe just to open up some news article and pick through it for trivia while he waited; but in the end his phone stays silent in his lap, his fingers bracing it against the possibility of a call but otherwise still against the weight, and his attention wanders over the crowds of travellers instead. There’s the usual commuters, easy to pick out from their tidy uniforms and disinterested expressions; many of them barely glance at the trains coming in, for how well their know their own routine. But there’s always a few others, those with suitcases or overstuffed bags anxious with waiting for their own departure to an unfamiliar place, or to return to a home left behind them, or those like Izaya himself, less interested in the signs for the trains than in the spill of people that emerge from the smooth-sliding doors. Those are the ones that hold Izaya’s attention: the girls anxious and jittery with waiting for boyfriends, or sons with strained shoulders looking for fathers, or friends in a cluster of laughter and bright eyes that scan every emerging passenger with barely-restrained enthusiasm ready to burst as soon as recognition strikes. They look happy, or anxious, or stressed, or excited; Izaya watches them with the distant attention of a moviegoer, wondering which of them is a mirror for his own feelings, wondering if he would recognize his emotions if he saw them in someone else. He wouldn’t, apparently, or at least he doesn’t over the span of time he spends waiting at the far corner of the station; and then the train he’s been waiting for pulls into the stop, and all Izaya’s attention to anything else around him narrows at once to the slide of those doors pulling open for the crush of passengers within.

It’s easy to see Shizuo. He stands taller than most around him to begin with; combined with the clean lines of his habitual bartender uniform and the pale of his bleached-blond hair, Izaya thinks he could find the other in a far denser crowd than the one at the half-empty station. Or maybe it’s just that it’s Shizuo, that there’s some indefinable pull that draws Izaya’s attention to the other; because he’s staring right at the far door of the train when Shizuo emerges, his focus pinned there as if he somehow knew where the other would appear. There’s the motion of black over white, the shift of a hand grabbing at an overhead handle to brace against the ducking motion that comes with disembarking; and then Shizuo, straightening to his full height on the station platform, and Izaya finds all the air in his lungs absent at once.

Shizuo looks the same. It’s like the months apart haven’t existed, as if the time that has lain so heavy on Izaya’s shoulders has missed him entirely; they could both be back in Ikebukuro, could be in the middle of one of their usual fights for how absolutely himself Shizuo appears. There’s no sense of nostalgic vertigo that comes with seeing the changes in a familiar face after some time apart; he looks just like Izaya remembers, with the same unthinking grace that comes with that inhuman strength he bears in his muscles and bones, that converts all the threats in the world into minor annoyances at best. The only difference is how relaxed his expression is, how completely calm he looks to be; Izaya is reminded vividly of those early phone calls, of the sound of Shizuo’s voice soft and easy on the relaxation that Izaya never got to see himself. It makes his breath catch, freezes him in place with a surge of panic like an animal caught in the glare of some too-bright light; and on the other end of the platform Shizuo is looking from face to face, his expression tightening into a frown as he considers the strangers scattered around him. His gaze slides from one to the next, skipping over the shadows where Izaya is half-hidden without any sign of so much as noticing him; and Izaya gasps an inhale as Shizuo turns to take a half-step forward towards the far end of the platform, feeling something between relief and misery at Shizuo’s gaze slipping so easily over him.

Shizuo peers into the shadows in front of him, tipping forward as if getting closer will make Izaya appear before him; and Izaya stares at him from the other end of the platform, feeling his heart stutter over the color of Shizuo’s hair, over the shift of Shizuo’s shoulders, over the deepening angle of his frown. It seems that Shizuo should feel the force of Izaya’s eyes on him, should be able to sense the other at the far end of the platform as he used to sense him in Ikebukuro; but it’s different out of the city, or maybe it’s the connection that’s broken between them, maybe the nostalgia Izaya has heard from their calls is just that, just a fading echo of something dying slowly with every breath he takes. Maybe this was a mistake, maybe Izaya should have never given Shizuo this name, maybe he should leave while he still has the chance; and then Shizuo straightens in a rush, and looks down to frown at his pocket as he pulls his phone free in a surge of intent.

Izaya’s hands tighten around the phone in his lap, his grip bearing down hard against the plastic. Some part of him still wants to run, wants to shut off the power and retreat into the shadows of the station and leave Shizuo here with a silent phone and an empty platform. But he can’t make himself move, and he can’t look away from Shizuo so close to him; and then his phone thrums with an incoming call, and Izaya blinks, and catches a sharp inhale, and brings the phone to his ear to answer without looking at the screen.

“Izaya,” Shizuo growls as soon as Izaya gets the phone to his ear, his voice rumbling over the start of irritation. It’s strange to see it on his face at the same time, dizzying to have his expression visible while hearing that familiar resonance at Izaya’s ear. “Where the hell _are_ you? If you sent me--”

“You must have gone blind,” Izaya says, his voice dragging to hoarseness in the back of his throat. “Turn around, Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo turns immediately, pivoting on his heel so fast Izaya can see the expectation of a knife in the action, can see Shizuo’s shoulders tense with anticipation of a blow that Izaya doesn’t have to offer. Izaya takes a breath to offer further instruction, to direct Shizuo’s gaze across the platform to seek him out; and Shizuo turns his head, like that one inhale has drawn his attention with the force of a magnet acting on iron, and he looks straight into the focus of Izaya’s fixed gaze on him. Izaya can see the tension of rising anger in Shizuo’s forehead give way, evaporating like it’s frost melting to the warmth of rain, can see the strain in the other’s expression go slack with the force of surprise. Izaya’s face heats, his cheeks coloring with a flush he can’t even attempt to fight back; but his lungs are still full of breath, there are still words waiting at his lips, and if he can’t restrain his expression at least he still has the use of his voice.

“Hi,” he says against the receiver of the phone, and watches Shizuo’s lashes dip, watches Shizuo’s gaze fall to read the words from his lips as well as hear them at his ear. “Good to see you again, Shizu-chan.”


	16. Nostalgic

“So,” Izaya says as they move away from the train station and down the sidewalk. “What now?” He doesn’t look at Shizuo as he says it. For how long he’s spent thinking about meeting the other again, for how long he spent gazing at him from across the length of the train platform, it turns out to be almost impossible to actually meet the other’s gaze, to face down the dark of those eyes and the focused crease at that forehead as Shizuo frowns attention at Izaya. Izaya can still feel the force of Shizuo’s gaze against the back of his neck, lingering there like the other is trying to draw Izaya’s attention back up to him by sheer silent willpower, but he doesn’t lift his head to meet it any more than he slows the rate of his forward movement to accommodate Shizuo’s uncertain stride through an unfamiliar city.

“What?” Shizuo sounds lost, like he’s entirely forgotten how to make sense of spoken words. “What do you mean, what now?”

“What do you want to do?” Izaya says, speaking slowly so he can pull the words into the weight of condescension. “You’re the one who wanted to see me. You’ve seen me. Are you planning on getting back on the train and heading home tonight?”

“Shut up,” Shizuo growls with something almost akin to his old fire in his voice. “I’m not going to _leave_ , I only just got here.”

“I know,” Izaya says. “So what do you want to _do_?” He stops suddenly, pivoting his chair around one wheel so he can turn and face Shizuo following behind him; Shizuo has to stumble to stop in time, his balance wavering so precipitously Izaya thinks for a moment the other is going to actually fall forward and into his lap. His breathing stutters, his shoulders tense; and Shizuo catches himself, stumbling backwards with a hiss of frustration and a frown to go with the hand he shoves roughly through his hair. His gaze drops to meet Izaya’s, his expression dark with irritation, and for a heartbeat Izaya can feel his body tense with adrenaline, can feel the sparks of a fight forming in the space between them. His shoulders hunch, his hands tighten at the arms of the chair beneath him as if to brace himself in place, to lean forward and into whatever reaction he can draw from Shizuo; and Shizuo’s expression flickers, his mouth twisting on uncertainty instead of anger as he takes another half-step back, surrendering the advantage of his height in a way he never would have, before, and the moment disintegrates as quickly as it formed. Shizuo’s the one who looks away first, ducking his head and casting his eyes down at the street instead of at Izaya, but it’s Izaya who turns away, pivoting himself around so he doesn’t have to see the way Shizuo isn’t looking at him.

“I hope you weren’t expecting me to entertain you,” he says, staring unseeing into the dark of oncoming night in front of him as the words twist themselves to savagery on his tongue. “I’m a busy man, Shizu-chan, I’m not here to be your tour guide or your free hotel.”

“Fuck you,” Shizuo snaps, sounding sufficiently angry at this totally unwarranted viciousness. “I have a room reserved, I wasn’t expecting you to--” He cuts himself off there, before he finishes stating what he doesn’t expect Izaya to do; Izaya can feel the force of Shizuo’s sincerity like a hand against his chest, like it’s crushing the breath out of him with something he can’t frame as relief or disappointment either one. He had thought about it, about taking Shizuo back to the space he calls his home here, about filling his present reality with the heat and desire of the past; but what sounded like a good idea in the midst of breathless fantasies is chilled with the immediacy of reality, now, and Izaya thinks at this exact second he wants nothing so much as he wants Shizuo to turn around and leave again as soon as possible.

“I wasn’t expecting you to entertain me,” Shizuo finally finishes, with his words so flat on tamped-down frustration that even Izaya can’t bristle at the almost-innuendo they would carry at his own lips. “I just wanted to see you.”

“So you’ve said,” Izaya says without turning around.

Shizuo gusts a sigh. “Look. Can’t we just...talk or something? We could get dinner. My treat.”

Izaya snorts. “How generous of you,” he deadpans, and then immediately, before Shizuo can growl himself back into frustration: “Fine. What do you want to eat?”

Izaya can almost see Shizuo stumble on surprise without needing to turn around to actually watch the motion. “What?” There’s an unspoken _really?_ in the gap of Shizuo’s speech; Izaya lets it linger until the other collects himself enough to go on speaking. “Uh. I don’t know. What’s around?”

Izaya lifts his hand to wave dismissal through the air. “All kinds of things,” he says with deliberate unhelpfulness. “Just pick something.”

“Uh,” Shizuo says, sounding entirely at a loss. “Damn.”

Izaya keeps his gaze on the street in front of him, and his attention on Shizuo behind him, gaining petty satisfaction from the other’s discomfort as Shizuo tries to formulate an answer out of nothing at all. Izaya’s ready to heave a sigh after a few seconds of awkward silence, ready to step in with an off-hand suggestion and regain his hold over the conversation as soon as the quiet goes too tense to bear. But then, unexpectedly:

“Sushi,” Shizuo says, and Izaya’s assumed dominance collapses into dust in the space between one heartbeat and the next, in the time it takes him to hiss a breath at the suggestion Shizuo’s words carry. “Let’s get sushi.”

Izaya forces a laugh past the sudden strain in his throat, pushing the appearance of amusement over his lips while his heart stammers over the memory of hands at his hips, lips crushing against his, the darkness of an isolated alley and the low rumble of “Come buy sushi! Very good, very tasty!” from the main street while Izaya forgot all the details of his own recent meal in the radiant friction of Shizuo’s body pressing against his. “How predictable,” he sneers while he blinks hard in a futile attempt to dislodge the haze of memories from his blurring vision. “Feeling nostalgic tonight, Shizu-chan?”

Shizuo growls his exhale from over Izaya’s shoulder. “If you have a better idea…”

“No,” Izaya says, lifting his hand to sweep through another gesture of casual dismissal he doesn’t feel. “It doesn’t matter to me, as long as you’re paying.” He steers himself towards the edge of the sidewalk and around a cluster of oncoming pedestrians. “There’s a restaurant around the corner from here. Follow me.”

Neither of them speaks again over the few blocks it takes to get to the restaurant. Izaya isn’t sure if he’s more frustrated or grateful to that; the silence prickles discomfort up his spine, makes him hyper-aware of every motion he takes and every shift of his shoulders, but at least he doesn’t have to steady out the rush of his breathing to attain some imitation of calm for his voice, and he’s glad to the chance to divert his thoughts away from the too-clear memories from years past, when Shizuo’s touch bruised without breaking and Shizuo’s mouth pressed to Izaya’s skin as often as it curved on a frown. It feels so immediate, when Izaya calls up the memories now, or when they rise to someone else’s words as they just did; it’s hard to remember that that’s in the past, now, that the slow-building silence between them and the ache in Izaya’s legs is all that remains of whatever almost-relationship he and Shizuo might have once had.

There’s no line at the sushi restaurant. It’s a small establishment, sitting nearly forgotten between two larger office buildings; Izaya thinks of it as proof of his ability to unearth the secrets in a town that he knows about it at all, given how out-of-the-way it is. He asks for a table for two, in the back of the restaurant instead of up at the bar he can’t comfortably reach anymore, with the frame of his chair around him; and Shizuo stays quiet behind him, following Izaya’s slow maneuvering through the restaurant with an unvoiced patience that Izaya can feel weighting at his shoulders with all the force self-consciousness can bring as he’s arranging himself at the far side of the table. He thanks the waitress for the glasses of water she provides as Shizuo is pulling out the chair on the other side and settling himself, finds the outline of a polite smile to give her as she offers them each a menu; and then she’s moving away to give them a moment alone, and Izaya is left with nowhere to look but at Shizuo sitting directly across from him.

Shizuo isn’t even pretending to look over the menu. He’s staring at Izaya, his whole attention fixed across the table on the other’s face; his frown is still there but it’s softer, maybe, eased out of the harsh edge of frustration and into something uncertain, like he’s not quite sure he understands what he’s looking at, like he’s confused by Izaya’s presence so close to him. It makes Izaya’s shoulders hunch, makes him want to flinch away, to retreat, to turn his back on the too-much attention in those eyes and exit this interaction the same way he could exit their phone calls. But he can’t hang up on Shizuo here, can’t turn his head and prevent Shizuo from staring at him; so all that’s left is to stare back, to meet the focus in that familiar face with every ounce of prickly self-assurance he has to offer.

“What’s the matter, Shizu-chan?” Izaya asks, lifting his chin into a haughty tilt that’s the closest he can come to confidence at the moment. “A picture would last longer. Did you forget what I look like so quickly?”

“I didn’t forget,” Shizuo says, so instantly it would carry some warmth with it if Izaya didn’t feel so frozen in place under the other’s stare. “You didn’t tell me you were in a wheelchair.”

Izaya’s fingers tighten at the arms of the chair under him, his jaw sets. “You didn’t ask.”

Shizuo’s focus slides away from Izaya’s face, down over the strain of his painfully straight shoulders to the angle of his legs weighting slack at the chair beneath him. “Is that from...our fight?”

“Yes.” Izaya can feel the strain of the breath he takes, can feel the effort of it pulling against the inside of his chest. It’s hard to fill his lungs when inhaling feels like forcing his ribs to shift up against some unbearable weight, like Shizuo’s stare has gained all the uncanny strength of his touch. “You succeeded in crippling me, at least. Congratulations.”

Shizuo flinches back in his chair as if Izaya had slapped him, as if Izaya had lunged forward and scored the point of a blade down the diagonal of his chest in a mirror of that old injury from so many years before. “I never wanted--”

“To put me in a wheelchair?” Izaya asks. “No. You just wanted to kill me. Sorry I didn’t do you the favor of dying like you hoped I would.”

“I _didn’t_ ,” Shizuo growls. “Jesus, Izaya, I don’t want you dead.”

Izaya raises an eyebrow. “No?” He braces an arm across the table in front of him, over the edge of his disregarded menu. “What exactly was that fight we had, then? If that’s the way you do foreplay nowadays I’m afraid it’s beyond my power to keep up with.”

“Shut up,” Shizuo tells him. That crease in his forehead is deepening, confusion giving way to anger as quickly as Izaya needles familiar, barely-healed wounds. “I lost my temper.”

Izaya scoffs. “Is that all,” he deadpans. “Of course. I can hardly expect you to keep your cool all the time. What are a few broken bones between friends?”

“You _provoked_ me,” Shizuo snaps. “You _deliberately_ \--”

“Yes,” Izaya says. “And that makes it all my fault? If you can’t even take responsibility for your own actions you’re no better than the monster I always said you were.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Shizuo spits, with so much vehemence that the waitress heading back towards their table pivots on her heel to find somewhere better to be in the nearly-empty restaurant. “You don’t make it easy to be around you, you know?”

“I didn’t ask you to come here,” Izaya snaps back. “ _You_ wanted to see me. Are you that ready to give up as soon as things are less than perfect?”

“ _I’m_ giving up?” Shizuo growls, his voice dropping over an edge into a low note of anger that Izaya recognizes, that Izaya knows he should turn and run from if he still could, if he could remember how to draw back instead of leaning in over the table, tipping forward to meet the forward angle of Shizuo’s shoulders like the other’s fury is magnetized to pull at the iron in his blood. “You _sabotaged_ us, Izaya, we were fine and you--”

“ _Fine_.” Izaya can feel the word tearing in the back of his throat, can feel it dragging blood into his voice like claws ripping open the pounding of adrenaline in his heart and the endless, helpless ache in his chest, the one he’s tried to ignore but that has only grown worse even as the physical pain in his legs ebbs and fades. “Nothing was _fine_. A pretty blonde looked at you once and you forgot all about me, was I supposed to just sit back and watch you abandon me?”

“I _didn’t_ ,” Shizuo insists. He’s leaning in far over the table, his gaze crackling with heat to punctuate every word that spills free of his lips; Izaya can feel the force of it like electricity against his spine, like the open threat of a blade drawing across skin. “I never abandoned you, _you’re_ the one who ran away and left me alone.”

Izaya laughs, a staticky burst of sound without any humor behind it at all. “And in my absence you finally realized what you wanted all along?”

It’s taunting. The words are sour on his tongue, laced with sarcasm so heavy Izaya can feel it dripping like poison from his lips. But:

“ _Yes_ ,” Shizuo says, and lifts his hand to grab at Izaya’s shoulder, to close his fingers tight against Izaya’s shirtsleeve and around his arm. Izaya freezes, his whole body going tense at the contact, but Shizuo doesn’t seem to notice for the intensity of the focus he’s turning on the other’s face. “I _need_ you, there’s no point when you’re not there.” His thumb is digging in close against Izaya’s arm, his hold bracing the other still even if Izaya could think to try to pull away; when Shizuo leans forward his forehead bumps against Izaya’s, the weight of it that strange, careful gentleness that was always so out-of-place in Ikebukuro.

“I meant what I said on the phone,” Shizuo says, his words still rough with frustration but quieter, now, a murmur so close to the other’s lips Izaya can almost feel the vibration against his mouth. “In my messages.” He takes a breath. The shift of air burns Izaya’s lips. “I really do--”

Izaya doesn’t know what stops Shizuo. Maybe it’s the fading of his anger, the raw edge of his frustration giving way enough to catch up with the runaway honesty at his lips. Maybe it’s the realization of where they are, in the middle of a restaurant with the few patrons and the staff all so carefully not looking at them they might as well be gaping open-mouthed. But Izaya thinks he knows what it is that stills Shizuo’s voice, that stops him with those words yet unsaid: it’s the instinctive, immediate tension that stiffens Izaya’s shoulders, that flexes his arm hard against Shizuo’s hold as his body tries to stage a retreat his mind knows he can’t achieve. Shizuo’s lashes dip, his gaze drops to the hand at Izaya’s arm; and he sucks in a sharp inhale, the rush of air so distinct Izaya can feel it like Shizuo’s stealing the breath from his lungs.

“Sorry,” he says, and his hold eases, the bruising weight of his thumb at Izaya’s arm sliding to deliberate gentleness, to such a delicate hold that it must be demanding his full attention to modulate his strength to such levels. Izaya could shake himself free, like this, could pull away and back over the distance of the table without any trouble at all. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t; except that Shizuo is still touching him, his fingers all but cradling Izaya’s arm in his hold, now, his forehead still weighting against Izaya’s. When he breathes Izaya can feel the heat of it against his mouth. When he blinks Izaya can see the shift of Shizuo’s lashes, can see the dip of the other’s attention giving way for a moment of reflexive motion; and he can see the way Shizuo’s gaze drops down, can see the way it catches for a moment at a point below Izaya’s eyes, where his own breathing has gone still with the force of the adrenaline racing through him.

“I’m sorry,” Shizuo say again, the words so soft Izaya can barely hear them at all, and Izaya doesn’t know what Shizuo’s apologizing for and he doesn’t ask for clarification. The space between them is electrified, alive with the tension of uncounted possibilities forming with every beat of Izaya’s heart and every moment Shizuo hesitates; Izaya watches Shizuo’s lashes dip again, watches the other’s gaze falter to linger long against the part of his lips. He can almost taste Shizuo’s mouth against his, can feel himself leaning in towards the heat of Shizuo’s breathing, towards the texture of his skin and the grip of his hands; and then Shizuo shifts forward, his chin lifting as he starts to tip in, and Izaya shoves against the edge of the table in front of him to wrench himself back and away in a single desperate action. His chair skids back by an inch, Shizuo’s hand falls away from his arm; and he’s retreating, withdrawing from his hold at the edge of the table and the lure of Shizuo’s shadowed eyes and the part of the other’s lips, soft now on shock as he blinks at Izaya’s precipitous movement.

“This was a mistake,” Izaya hears himself saying, his voice coming strange and echoey, like it’s a long way off, like he’s at some infinite distance from himself even as the gap across the table to Shizuo seems to narrow to nothing, as if he’s still tipped in with his forehead pressed to the other’s and his lips a breath away from regaining the heat of Shizuo’s mouth at his again. Izaya feels frantic, like the whole of the world he has built around himself is collapsing, like in a moment it’s his own lips that will give voice to that unfinished _love_ of Shizuo’s sentence. “I shouldn’t--” and he’s pulling away before he can figure out how he wants to complete that statement, retreating from the too-narrow span of the table and the draw of Shizuo’s ire like an open flame across from him. The restaurant is absolutely silent as he makes his way through it, with the tension of interested attention rather than the calm of idle unconcern; but Izaya doesn’t look around him, and no one tries to stop him from pushing open the door and escaping out into the shadows of the night to leave Shizuo alone behind him again.


	17. Sincere

Izaya can feel Shizuo’s fingerprints against his skin.

They’ve lingered there all evening, like a bruise he can’t see, an injury to his psyche instead of to his body. He keeps rubbing at them without thinking about the motion, curling his fingers around his arm and pressing in like he’s trying to wear the memory off his skin, like he’s trying to press the friction into a permanent mark right through the thin fabric of his shirt; he snatches his hand away the first few times he catches himself at it, but it’s no good, and after an hour he gives it up entirely, resigning himself to the obsessive drag of his fingers working at his arm as he stares blankly up at the ceiling over the couch in his living room. It’s where he went, as soon as he came back, to lay down across the soft of the cushions and cast his eyes up to the safe, bland white of the ceiling overhead while he does his best to think about nothing at all; and he succeeds in the first part, at least, if not the second.

He doesn’t know what he wants. Shizuo, Ikebukuro, the full use of his legs, the heat of another’s touch; he craves them with such desperation he can’t stand to look at it directly, can’t stand to even put words to the desire for how sharply he feels its absence. It’s as if acknowledging the lack will open up a space inside him that he’ll never again be able to pretend he can fill on his own, as self-destructive as tearing his heart out of his chest and offering it to the crushing grip of Shizuo’s impossibly strong hands to do with as he pleases. The idea makes him feel panicky, makes his breathing catch and his aching legs tense until his eyes prickle with involuntary tears of pain and fright alike; but he can’t rewind time, can no more undo the last hour than he can undo the last ten years, and his arm burns like his skin is blistering into an allergic reaction to Shizuo’s touch, like the icy chill of his own isolated existence is finally giving way to the heat of a sun he had been ready to deny existed at all.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there. He didn’t look at the clock when he came in; with the light of day long ago faded to the deep shadows of night, the windows of his room offer no sense of time passing. It’s like being in a coma, Izaya thinks vaguely, like drifting through unconsciousness while time passes unmeasured around him; minutes, hours, months, perhaps a full half a year gone past without any deliberate attention on his part. A stasis, maybe, distant from pain and memory and heartbreak all three; but temporary nonetheless, a pause in the course of existence instead of its final goal.

Izaya’s phone rings in his pocket.

He didn’t take it out when he let himself back into his apartment. He didn’t look at it at all. It’s been in his jeans since he hung up that brief call on the train platform, the weight familiar enough he thought about it no more than the easy movement of his hands, and perhaps less than the constant pain radiating from his injured legs; it’s only with the hum of an incoming call that he’s reminded of its existence, of the tether to the rest of the world it forms. He could ignore the shiver of communication in his pocket, could push it to the back of his awareness the same way he pushes back unwanted memories from his thoughts, and tamps down the everpresent hurt in his legs, and shuts his eyes to the dull, constant loneliness that fills the inside of his chest with every beat of his heart; it would be easy, it would be simple, all he has to do is not act.

Izaya lets his hold on his arm go, and reaches down to pull his phone free of his pocket, and answers the call.

He doesn’t have to look at the display. He knows who it is, even after the unmeasured span of time since the aborted attempt at dinner. “Shizu-chan.”

Shizuo’s exhale is loud against the speaker, weighted into relief that shivers down Izaya’s spine like a touch. “Izaya.” A statement, the answer to a question instead of the start of one. “You’re awake.”

“So are you,” Izaya says. It’s almost a taunt, almost mockery to point out the inanity of Shizuo’s statement; but his voice fails to hone the edge that would give the words any force, and instead they come out deliberate, soft, like Izaya’s pointing out a single facet of similarity between them, like he’s reading the early-morning timestamp on a voicemail to carry the implication of a whole night’s worth of insomnia with it.

“Yeah.” Shizuo takes a breath and sighs it out, slow, like he’s lingering over the taste of the air. Izaya wonders if he’s smoking, if he has his lips pressing close against the weight of a cigarette as he speaks. “I’ve been thinking.”

Izaya doesn’t ask what about. He knows the answer as if it’s his own, as if these last hours of silent stillness have been to bring him into alignment with Shizuo’s own introspection, two halves of a single entity echoing each other even over the span of time and space and history between them. There’s a pause of silence, a breath of time like a deliberate inhale of air before jumping into the endless depth of the ocean; and then Shizuo: “I still want to tell you,” so softly it sounds like a whisper, like he’s offering up some fragile secret that he would have known better, before, than to offer to Izaya’s keeping.

Izaya shuts his eyes and lets the words settle into the framework of his chest, lets his heart settle itself into the cool dark of the night, of that almost-ocean, of the peace that comes with a lack of remaining options. Everything goes calm, goes quiet, the way he imagines death would feel, or maybe resignation to one’s own mortality. It reminds him of a phone pressed to his ear at the roof of a half-constructed building, reminds him of a _goodbye_ he believed to be true, at the time. Maybe these are the shallows of his ocean, maybe this is the feeling of surfacing from too long drowning slow; and Izaya sighs out, lets the last of his saved oxygen go from his body, and lets his lungs fill on what new air life has to offer him.

“Come over,” he says, and his voice is calm, cool and level as the surface of a night-dark sea, with only the faintest ripples of emotion flickering across it. “Tonight.”

Izaya can hear the inhale Shizuo takes against the other end of the phone as clearly as if the breath is ruffling against his hair, as if Shizuo’s there in the room with him, like the telltale static of the phone line between them has faded and vanished entirely. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Izaya says. “I’ll send you my address.”

“Okay,” Shizuo says, as easy as that, and Izaya wonders if it always could have been this easy, just a conversation instead of the fight it has always been, before. He pulls the phone away from his ear and taps the screen to end the call without offering any kind of farewell to punctuate the close of the conversation; he’s not sure he could find the voice for a goodbye right now, even if only for the few minutes it’ll take Shizuo to travel. He types in the address of his apartment building, and the room number for his space on nearly the topmost floor; and then he sends it to Shizuo, and pushes himself to sit up on the couch so he can get back into his wheelchair. It takes him a few minutes to finish the maneuver and reach to replace his phone in his lap; and then he moves across the room to the front door, to turn the lock to open instead of closed against whatever nonspecific dangers may be waiting in the brightly-lit hallway of the apartment building, and turns around to move towards his bedroom without waiting for Shizuo to arrive.

He shuts the door behind him when he comes in, settling the barrier into place like it’s a wall, like it’ll offer the protection from Shizuo’s presence that Izaya can’t even convince himself he wants, even now with his shaking legs aching with the force of adrenaline running through him to tense every part of his body with involuntary tension. He wheels himself around to the corner of the room, where his chair won’t be in the way; and then he replaces his phone in his pocket, and goes about the process of getting out of the familiar support behind him. It’s a painful process, like it always is; there’s a moment of standing upright, with his full weight on his injured legs, when Izaya wonders if he’s going to pass out from the agony radiating up his spine, if he’ll collapse before Shizuo even gets here. But Izaya’s not in the habit of surrendering to pain, and this is no exception; he grits his teeth, and forces himself forward, and makes his way to the floor, where he can sit in front of the door and press his shoulders against the support behind him. It feels stable, fixed in a way Izaya can’t remember feeling for years, maybe for the whole of his life; it’s a comfort even just to have it supporting his shoulders for this moment. He tips his head back against the weight of it, and shuts his eyes to the familiar shadows of his room, and waits for Shizuo to come to him.

He hears the knock on the door first. It’s a distant sound from the other side of the bedroom wall, and Izaya doesn’t answer, doesn’t even open his eyes; he just waits with the sound of his breathing against the quiet of his room. There’s another knock, louder and longer this time; and then a hum from the phone in his pocket, and he reaches to answer without looking.

“I’m here,” Shizuo says without waiting for a greeting.

“I know,” Izaya says. “The door’s unlocked, Shizu-chan. Come in.”

He can hear the click of the front door coming open, can almost feel it in the shudder of the apartment walls around him, like the weight of his head against his bedroom door is enough to connect him to the sensation of his home giving way to let Shizuo into it, to open Izaya’s life to the other as Izaya has never been able to manage alone. Izaya’s breathing catches, his heart speeds, and at his ear: “Where are you?” Shizuo asks, so softly Izaya can’t even hear the echo from the other side of the door.

“In the bedroom,” Izaya says. “Leave your shoes at the door.”

There’s a pause, a moment of quiet from the phone while Izaya imagines he can hear the sound of Shizuo toeing his shoes off, imagines he can feel the pattern of footsteps against a floor more accustomed to the friction of wheels than the weight of feet. He does hear the door shut against the frame as Shizuo pushes it shut, is saying “Turn the lock” before Shizuo has more than taken a breath to ask. Shizuo breathes out again, letting the uncertainty in his voice go along with his air; and then the door is locked, and there’s just the two of them inside the boundaries of the space.

Izaya stays quiet. It’s easier to hear Shizuo breathing that way, easier to listen to the weight of the other’s footfalls scuffing soft over the polished floor of his apartment; he can hear Shizuo taking the long way through the living room, can almost imagine the upward tilt of the other’s head to take in the surroundings as he makes his way through the space of Izaya’s home. Izaya stays still, head tipped back against the door and heart racing in his chest as he waits for Shizuo to finish looking at the trappings of the other’s existence and return his attention to the actuality of it.

The footsteps feel louder when Shizuo starts to approach. Izaya can feel each one run up his spine, lightning running through his body in reverse to unground itself and crackle upwards into the sky; he feels like his heart might stall itself out against the force of adrenaline in him, feels like he might come undone at once if he opens his eyes. The footsteps draw closer, thudding heat into the floor and pressure into Izaya’s chest at one and the same time; and then they go still, and when Shizuo sighs an exhale Izaya can hear it in offset stereo between his phone and reality. There’s a shift at the door, the weight of fingertips, maybe, laid carefully against the barrier; and then Shizuo takes a breath, and starts to speak.

“I’ve told you about a lot of things,” he says, his voice so low Izaya almost can’t hear the rough edge on it, almost can’t hear the catch of strain at the back of the other’s throat. He imagines he can feel Shizuo’s fingertips against the door like they’re brushing against his own skin, like his awareness has spread up through that weight at his shoulder to reach out to close the distance and press itself against the fingerprints he thinks he would recognize on contact. “Ikebukuro, mostly. My life, though it’s not very interesting. The people I know.” Another breath. Izaya can hear it under the gap of the door behind him. “Did I ever tell you about Izaya?”

Izaya takes a breath to push back against the pressure at his chest, to force his lungs to fill with the possibility for speech he doesn’t know if he can muster. He shakes his head without opening his eyes. “No.”

“Yeah.” Shizuo shifts at the door; spreading his fingers wide, maybe, to press his palm flat to the surface. “I’ve known him since high school. We had a shared friend; Shinra, you remember, the one who’s head-over-heels in love with Celty. Weird guy in general but especially for being friends with the both of us.” There’s a sound against the door, the noise of Shizuo tipping forward to press his forehead to the weight of it.

“The first time I met him was…” and Izaya’s memory picks up where Shizuo’s words trail away, filling in the details of golden hair in springtime sunshine, the drag of a frown and the crease at a forehead that promised focus, all-in attention for that moment of time, and Izaya’s knowledge with the same breath that he would do anything to keep those eyes on him, no matter what emotion shadowed behind them.

“We fought a lot.” An understatement, but with the current audience Izaya thinks Shizuo can be forgiven for what he leaves unstated. “Everywhere, all the time, whenever we could get our hands on each other. I couldn’t get rid of him, it was like he was everywhere I turned, like I was seeing him even when he wasn’t there at all.” A laugh, low and warm with recollection. “That made a lot more sense after we started kissing, at least. Not that we fought any less. It just meant I could actually get my hands on him, sometimes. When he let me, I think. I’m pretty sure he was manipulating me for years, there.”

Izaya huffs a laugh that would be more sincere, he thinks, if it didn’t feel so much like a sob. “Sounds like a real winner.”

“Yeah,” Shizuo says. “I hated him, you know. I hate fighting. I hate violence. It felt like that was all I could ever do, with him, like no matter how hard I tried to stay calm it only lasted until I’d catch a glimpse of his smile and then I’d just go to pieces all at once, like nothing else mattered but him. And he would _laugh_ , no matter what I did, like it was a game, like he was enjoying himself.”

There’s a very long pause. Izaya can see the years spiraling out into that silence like he’s watching the film of a movie running on fast-forward to spool through the chasing, the growls, the teasing and the anger and the want and the heat all at once, compressing everything down to a flicker of memory and the thud of a heartbeat as Izaya brings himself forward, at last, to where he knew they would end up, to the conclusion inevitably waiting at the end of all those teasing chases and all those breathless shadows.

“I almost killed him,” Shizuo says to the far side of the door, and Izaya feels the words shiver down his spine on contact. “In our last fight. We always said we hated each other, that we were going to kill each other, but then we--” He breaks off again, and Izaya takes a breath and tastes smoke on the air, the acrid bite of a fire set at his own fingers and the ache of a humorless laugh in the back of his throat as he did his best to burn away all the evidence of his too-much feeling, of his overcommitment to a relationship that was only ever supposed to be a game, only ever supposed to be temporary. He had known even then that it wouldn’t work, had known with a strange, bitter pride that Shizuo would find a way to survive in spite of everything; but then, it hadn’t been Shizuo he was trying to see dead that night.

“He left,” Shizuo resumes, leaving memories to speak for themselves, leaving his silence to carry the world-weight of emotion too heavy to fit into the fragile shape of words. “He left and I stayed and I had everything the way I wanted it all along, my city and my life and my peace, all back like he was never there at all.”

Izaya swallows against the knot tightening on his throat to cut off his words, his breath, his existence entirely. “A dream come true,” he says, and the words are sincere instead of sardonic, too loaded with the ache in his chest to submit to his control. “Congratulations.”

“It wasn’t.” Shizuo’s words come fast but without heat; they’re just a statement, a rejection of Izaya’s assumed conclusion as fast as it forms. “After all of that time saying I hated him, after all that time trying to get him out of my life, I don’t know what to do with myself when he’s not there.” There’s a shift of a footstep scuffing at the floor; Izaya pictures Shizuo stepping in closer, leaning harder against the door like he can push himself through it bodily if he tries. “I thought I was trying to chase him out of my city but that wasn’t it at all. I just never thought that I might…”

Silence falls again. Izaya imagines he can hear the beat of Shizuo’s heart on the other side of the door. He wonders if Shizuo can hear the sound of his breathing, wonders if Shizuo can feel the warmth of his existence through the barrier between them.

“I just want to see him again,” Shizuo says, and Izaya isn’t sure, now, if he’s listening to the phone at his ear or the pre-echo of the words under the door, muffled by the distance but still clear enough to carry their own meaning. “I’ve tried to talk to him before, to tell him, but it doesn’t work.” Shizuo’s voice takes on an edge of frustration, the faintest drag of heat as he growls against the barrier. “I can’t get the words out, or he doesn’t want to listen, and I just need to _tell_ him so he knows.” A pause. A breath. “So I know he knows.”

Everything goes silent again. There’s no tension to it this time, no burden of unvoiced words still tugging at the end of Shizuo’s sentence. There’s just quiet, the peace of waiting, of a patience Izaya didn’t know Shizuo had in him to offer. He keeps his eyes shut, and listens to the sound of his heartbeat, and presses back against the weight on the other side of the door; and then he takes a breath, and speaks.

“That’s easy, then,” he says, with as much offhand unconcern as he can muster. “Why are you getting so melodramatic about it?” He braces his hand at the floor, tightens his fingers in against the surface. “Just go and tell him.” And he pulls the phone away from his ear, and lets it fall to the floor without bothering to hang up before he pushes himself sideways and away from the motion of the door.

Izaya is barely clear before the latch of the door clicks over his head, the sound of the simple machinery speaking to the handle turning before the weight of the door has yet been pushed open. He looks up towards the frame, feeling his heart skip in his chest, feeling his breathing stick in his throat; and then the door is coming open, and Shizuo is standing there over him.

There’s no hesitation. Izaya doesn’t think he could make himself move even if he knew what he wanted to do, doesn’t have any words beyond the ones he’s already given; but Shizuo doesn’t wait for more, doesn’t even pause over Izaya’s position on the floor instead of somewhere more comfortable. He just moves, dropping to a knee in front of the other as quickly as he lets his hold on the door go, as his phone slips from his hand to fall to the floor and be forgotten as quickly as it lands.

“Izaya,” he says, breathing the other’s name with a care Izaya’s never heard from him before as his hand lifts to push the other’s hair back and away from his face. Izaya’s shoulders tense, his body stiffening with the start of near-panic, with the electricity of Shizuo’s touch brushing against his skin; but Shizuo doesn’t pull away, and Izaya’s grateful for that, somewhere in the dizzy whirl of his thoughts. Shizuo’s fingers curl against the back of his head, Shizuo ducks to breathe in against Izaya’s skin; and “I love you,” Shizuo says, and his mouth presses to Izaya’s like the punctuation at the end of his sentence. Izaya’s eyes shut, Izaya’s throat tenses on a sound, and he doesn’t know if it’s a whimper or a moan but it doesn’t matter, with his coherency stripped from his tongue by the weight of Shizuo’s lips against his. The static is gone, the distance evaporated; there’s just Shizuo’s hand at Izaya’s neck, and Shizuo’s mouth against Izaya’s, and the sound of Shizuo’s voice ringing clear in Izaya’s ears like the words carry the full weight of a blow against his awareness.

They don’t speak. It’s uncanny, how easily they fit together again, as if those months of silence never existed, as if Shizuo has spent his entire life working around Izaya’s newly limited mobility, as if that’s what his too-much strength has been intended for all along. Izaya reaches up for Shizuo’s shoulder, slides his arm up and around Shizuo’s neck, and Shizuo’s hand touches at Izaya’s waist and draws down, the casual strength of his fingers tracing Izaya’s thigh and up and under to slide the other’s leg wide, to make space for Shizuo to lean in closer at the same time he draws Izaya in towards himself one-handed. Izaya slides over the floor, pain-clumsy movement granted his old grace back by the press of Shizuo’s hold against him, and then his legs are around Shizuo’s hips, and Shizuo’s hand is sliding along the curve of his spine, and Izaya is clinging to Shizuo against him, both arms wound close against the other’s neck while he catches the give of Shizuo’s lip between his teeth, while he licks in to taste the smoky heat of the other’s mouth against his tongue again. It’s like tasting a favorite sweet from childhood, something half-forgotten that pulls an immediate emotional reaction before adult rationality has caught up, and Izaya is gasping for air, his breathing stalling in his chest as his blood comes alive in his veins with heat he had forgotten could exist in the world.

Shizuo doesn’t pull away. Izaya had half-expected him to, had expected Shizuo to flinch back from the force of reality dragged back around them by Izaya’s too-hasty inhale; but Shizuo’s hold tightens instead of drawing away, his hands sliding down to brace Izaya in against him as Izaya’s fingers tighten at his hair in an unthinking, desperate attempt to keep him where he is. Shizuo leans forward, Izaya catches a startled breath; and then Shizuo is getting to his feet, taking the whole of Izaya’s weight in his arms without any sign of effort, and Izaya is clutching against the other in a reflexive attempt to steady himself. His legs flex to hold him tight against Shizuo’s waist, his breathing rushes out of him in a gasp of sudden pain; but:

“I’ve got you,” Shizuo says, and he does, his hands are utterly unflinching where they’re pressing at Izaya’s back and hip to brace him in place. Izaya takes a breath, feeling like his world has tilted off its usual axis; and Shizuo is moving, turning to step in towards the bed without any hesitation, and for a moment it’s like they’re back in Ikebukuro, like the last six months never happened at all, like Izaya’s legs aren’t weighed down with the pain of absence and they’re not in the shadows of an unfamiliar city. It’s just them together, like it always was, like it always used to be, Shizuo’s hands bracing Izaya’s weight and Izaya’s fingers tangled in Shizuo’s hair, and for the first moment Izaya can’t even think to press his mouth to Shizuo’s for the gasping relief rushing through him.

The bed is soft as Shizuo presses his knee against the edge of it, as he tips in to let Izaya fall back across the sheets underneath them in the shadow of his shoulders. Izaya thinks Shizuo is going to pull away for a brief moment, can feel his fingers tensing into a desperate hold on the other’s hair to prevent any such retreat; but Shizuo doesn’t seem to notice Izaya’s hold any more than he moves to draw back. He’s leaning in instead, ducking his head to crush his mouth down against the part of Izaya’s lips, and Izaya can feel his whole body go hot at once, can feel electricity surging through him to quicken all the numb corners of his existence. He lets his hands at Shizuo’s hair slide free, lets his touch draw down to the collar of the other’s shirt instead; and this is familiar too, this odd nostalgia of clothing falling open for the touch of his fingers like toppling back into easy conversation with an old friend. This is the same clasp at the side of Shizuo’s bowtie, this is that same too-tight topmost button of his shirt; this is the way his breathing always catches on the beginnings of a growl when Izaya’s fingers slide down his chest to the edge of his vest, the unspoken _be careful_ rumbling against his lips as Izaya’s fingers drag across the lines of that beloved uniform. Izaya doesn’t have to look down to work open the fastenings of Shizuo’s clothes, to undo the close fit of the other’s vest and lay open the front of his clean white shirt; he can do it with his eyes shut, with his attention distracted, with his whole body trembling with the tension of anticipation rising too high in him to be restrained. Shizuo’s shirt comes open, his undershirt is left as thin barrier between the press of Izaya’s fingertips and the shift of Shizuo’s breathing in his chest; and Izaya leaves the last layer of fabric to drop his fingers down instead, so he can curl his fingers in and under the buckle of Shizuo’s belt.

It’s so easy. It should be harder than this, Izaya thinks distantly, in what span of his own thoughts he has left after Shizuo’s mouth against his lips and Shizuo’s hands on his body have claimed their portion of his attention. It’s been months apart, and years before that, with no greater connection than the rough straining for physical satisfaction that comes with dark alleys and desperate touches; but it’s easy to do this, to unfasten Shizuo’s belt and slacks without even looking up, to coordinate the work of his hands with the upwards slide of Shizuo’s touch drawing his shirt up and off his body. They break away for a moment, Shizuo leaning back so he can pull Izaya’s shirt off the other’s head and toss it aside; but it’s only for a breath, for a heartbeat of time too short for even Izaya to feel the shiver of panic, and then Shizuo is back against him, crushing a kiss to Izaya’s mouth with as much force as if it’s the blow Izaya still vaguely feels that he should expect. Shizuo’s hands are hot at Izaya’s skin, his fingers fitting in against the line of the other’s spine and drawing down against the dip of Izaya’s waist, and Shizuo’s touch is just skimming against the waistband of Izaya’s jeans when Izaya gets the front of the other’s clothes open and presses his fingers in under the open fall of the fabric.

Shizuo is hotter here, his cock flushed to radiance greater even than what Izaya can feel like a burn against his skin as Shizuo’s fingers draw around to work open the front of his jeans as a first step to free him from the weight of his clothes. Izaya presses his fingers in closer, urging them down under the loose weight of Shizuo’s slacks to draw his palm in against the resistance of Shizuo against him, and something in his chest knots tight, something almost the beginnings of tears for the unbelievable reality of having this again, of having _Shizuo_ again, the heat of his body under Izaya’s fingertips and the gasp of his breathing at Izaya’s mouth. Izaya’s heart is racing, his breathing catching to tip over the edge of that unexpected nostalgia; and Shizuo pulls the front of Izaya’s jeans open, and his hand pushes inside, and Izaya’s momentary emotion disintegrates into the surge of heat that runs through his body at the touch of Shizuo’s hand against him. His hips jerk up, his throat tightens over a groan, and over him Shizuo huffs a breath, the sound more heat than form at his lips.

“God,” he says, “Izaya” and he’s pressing in farther, sliding the palm of his hand down while Izaya bucks up against his touch, feeling himself go harder under the contact like Shizuo’s presence is enough all on its own to stir him to greater heights of arousal than he can ever manage alone. It reminds him of those late-night phone calls, of Shizuo’s voice dragging over the rough edge of pleasure at his ear while Izaya stroked hard over himself and imagined Shizuo’s grin, Shizuo’s heat, Shizuo’s touch; but there’s no static on the sound of Shizuo’s breathing in the space over Izaya’s lips, and no haze of imagination between the friction against Izaya’s length and the immediacy of his desire. There’s just Shizuo breathing hard over him, his cock hard under Izaya’s touch and his fingers heavy at Izaya’s skin and his eyes fixed on Izaya under him, his whole focus turned in on the other like he’s entirely forgotten any of the rest of the world exists. It’s terrifying, to be looked at so intently, to be seen so thoroughly by someone else; it’s the most incredible thing Izaya’s ever experienced. He wants to turn away, wants to arch up into it, wants to flinch back and wants to open himself up into the weight of Shizuo’s attention; he can’t decide which, can’t make sense out of the competing reactions in his head, and then Shizuo is ducking his head, and rocking back over his knees, and Izaya is left to gasp for the air he had forgotten to breathe as Shizuo draws his hand sideways to tug the other’s jeans down and off his hips.

It ought to be something of a struggle -- Izaya has to fight for more than minimal movement from his legs, and what success he can achieve inevitably comes with enough pain to undermine any sense of success -- but Shizuo doesn’t wait for Izaya to pull himself free as he once would have. He’s catching at Izaya’s knee instead, lifting the other’s leg for him as he pulls his jeans down and off with as much ease as if they’ve been doing this for years, as if he’s always known how to work around the limitations of Izaya’s damaged body. He pulls Izaya’s jeans free of his other leg, turns to cast the clothing over the edge of the bed to fall along with the other’s shirt; and then he’s leaning back in, tipping forward over Izaya lying across the bed to cast the shadow of his shoulders over the other beneath him.

“Izaya,” he says again, his voice dragging over those strange low notes that he’s learned in the months apart, as if he’s broken apart the name into its component pieces and found more depth to the sounds than Izaya’s ever heard before. It makes Izaya’s blood surge to heat and steals his breath from his lungs, and then Shizuo is leaning in over him and sliding his hand into Izaya’s hair to brace the other still against the weight of his mouth, against the press of his tongue. Izaya’s eyes close of their own volition, his hands come up to clutch for handholds at Shizuo’s hair; and Shizuo pulls away to blink down at him again, his eyes dark and heavy-lashed and his gaze wandering Izaya’s features like he’s running his touch over the familiar lines, like he’s trying to pick out the minute differences that a new city has made on the other’s face.

Izaya takes a breath, struggling to fill his lungs with air as he tries to find logic for his thoughts again. “There’s lube in the drawer,” he says, and turns his head to duck aside from Shizuo’s gaze and look instead to the direction he gestures in. “It’s right at the top, it’s easy to find.”

Shizuo huffs a breath. “Okay” and he’s moving, leaning over to follow the indication of Izaya’s gesture so he can stretch and reach for the aforementioned drawer. His free hand drops to Izaya’s hip, his fingers landing gently against the other’s body like he’s bracing himself in place, or maybe like he’s holding Izaya still, weighting the promise of his touch against the other like an anchor to keep Izaya where he is. Izaya wonders what that weight is meant to do: to hold him steady, maybe, against the tremors of anticipation he can feel coursing so hot through his veins, or maybe to keep him from running, from slipping free of Shizuo’s touch on him as if he still could, as if he could make himself pull away even if he had the mobility to do so. But that touch is holding him in place more securely even than the ache of his legs weighting at the sheets beneath him; and then Shizuo is coming back with the bottle in hand, and his thumb is pushing the lid open as quickly as he lifts his hand from Izaya’s hip to turn up for the liquid instead.

Izaya watches Shizuo’s fingers go slick with lubrication, watches the span of them catch the moonlight from the window to shine with all the promise of the action to come. Shizuo closes the bottle, and tosses it aside, and then he’s reaching back out for Izaya’s knee, his fingers curling in and under the weight to draw it wide over the bed. Izaya hisses a breath, feels his leg twitch in involuntary resistance to Shizuo’s force; but Shizuo doesn’t notice, or doesn’t react if he does. He’s looking down instead, his head ducked so his hair falls all in front of his face, and then his fingers touch Izaya, wet pressing close against taut heat, and Izaya’s legs flex again in a brief, involuntary attempt to rock himself up to meet Shizuo’s fingers. He can’t breathe, he can’t relax, he can’t think; but Shizuo’s fingers are holding his leg wide, and Shizuo’s touch is pressing against him, and then Shizuo pushes, and his finger slides into Izaya, and all the tension winding into Izaya’s body goes slack and shivering with the drag of that force. His heart is racing, his breathing is catching; but Shizuo’s touching him, Shizuo’s inside him, and the stretch and ache of that is familiar in a way that feels as much like home as the city Izaya left behind him.

Shizuo isn’t slow. Izaya’s glad for that; he doesn’t know if he could bear it if Shizuo decided to be gentle, isn’t certain he can bear it even as it is. But Shizuo remembers this too, or maybe it’s as instinctive for him as it is for Izaya, to urge a second finger alongside the first as quickly as Izaya shudders himself into surrender to the force, to press in deeper and harder with every stroke so Izaya keeps tensing involuntarily against the stretch. It’s different than his own fingers are, the angle and the force and the shape all together; there’s no way to lose track of who he’s with, of who it is moving into him, any more than Izaya ever really managed to lose himself to the stand-in of his own touch for Shizuo’s certain thrusts. It’s better too, like this, with the unflinching force of the other’s hand to override whatever flutter of strain Izaya might feel, to work into him and seek out the electric pleasure of too-much while Izaya is still tensing reflexively against it; and then Shizuo’s fingers press far inside him, bearing down against Izaya with unswerving certainty, and Izaya’s whole body tenses, his spine arching to curve him up and off the bed as his breathing tears from him in a gasping rush. Shizuo makes a wordless noise, low and hot and satisfied; and then he moves again, thrusting hard into Izaya like he’s demanding an encore, and Izaya gives it to him with helpless instinct.

It’s overwhelming. Enough to have the taste of Shizuo’s lips on Izaya’s, enough to have the whisper of cigarette smoke in the air, enough to have the print of Shizuo’s skin close against his own; this is more, too much, Shizuo’s fingers stretching him wide and jarring pleasure through him with every thrust, Shizuo’s eyes on him to follow every helpless shudder of heat, Shizuo’s slacks undone and loose over the promised heat of his cock. Izaya was never supposed to have any of this, he was supposed to be done with this, he was supposed to satisfy himself with an existence absent all these things; and now he has them, not just in memories or through a phone line but here, this moment, Shizuo’s fingers stroking him higher towards pleasure and Shizuo’s hold at his knee tensing with want and those words still hanging in the air, that confession still so heavy at Izaya’s lips he can feel it weighting his chest when he breathes in. He can’t find words, can barely find air for himself around the slide of Shizuo’s fingers and the emotion choking his voice; and then “Fuck,” Shizuo says again, like punctuation for some thought that went unvoiced, and he’s drawing his fingers back at once, so quickly Izaya is still gasping with the loss while Shizuo is reaching under his other knee to catch at his hip and drag him in closer. Izaya slides over the bed, the sheets pulling slippery against his back as Shizuo pulls the other in towards himself, as he lifts Izaya bodily off the bed by inches so he can rock himself in closer. Izaya gasps a breath, reaches to brace himself steady against the rush of blood to his head from his sudden almost-inversion; his fingers hit fabric, his grip tightens on the slick smooth of Shizuo’s vest, and as Shizuo pulls him into alignment Izaya’s hands close to fists around Shizuo’s open vest and shirtfront. He’s expecting a protest to this abuse of the familiar uniform; but Shizuo doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even lift his head as he lets his hold on Izaya’s hip go to reach down to the rumpled mess they’ve made of his slacks. He pushes the fabric down by an inch, enough to free the dark-flushed heat of his cock and to close his hand to a casual grip against the base; and then his hips tip forward, and he presses against Izaya’s entrance, and Izaya’s arms flex of their own accord, his muscles tightening in a helpless, incoherent attempt to drag Shizuo in towards him. It’s the wrong angle, even if his efforts were enough for Shizuo to even notice, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because Shizuo’s legs are flexing, his body is curving forward in one smooth motion, and the slick tension of Izaya’s entrance eases to let Shizuo’s cock slide forward and into him.

Izaya doesn’t mean to make the sound he does. He means to exhale, maybe, to breathe out a sigh of something like relief at the feel of Shizuo inside him again, at the heat of Shizuo’s cock filling the stretched-open space of his body. But he goes tight instead, his whole body flexing hard around Shizuo as if to hold him still, as if to pull him deeper, and what he says is “ _Shizu-chan_ ,” with his voice skidding up into embarrassingly helpless heights, like he’s on the verge of coming just from the first thrust of Shizuo driving into him. Izaya would be self-conscious about it, would press his lips tight together and force back any other unwanted reaction; but Shizuo’s hand is seizing hard at his knee, Shizuo’s chest is flexing on a groan, and whatever heat Izaya’s voice carried is nothing compared to the way his name sounds resonating against Shizuo’s throat.

“ _Izaya_ ” and he’s leaning in, letting his cock go to reach out to brace himself over Izaya’s shoulder as he tips closer. His open shirt falls over the gap between them; the loose fabric whispers across the bare skin of Izaya’s chest and raises goosebumps that Izaya doesn’t notice for the pressure at his thighs, for the strain inside him, for the dip of Shizuo’s lashes as the other leans in over him. Shizuo’s still holding at the inside of Izaya’s knee, pressing up to angle the other’s leg up close against his chest; Izaya can feel the strain shaking through him, can feel the effort of the position running up against Shizuo’s grip and falling away to unimportance.

Shizuo shudders an exhale. “I missed you,” he says, and then he’s moving, and Izaya can do nothing but clutch at his shirt, curl his fingers into a fist at Shizuo’s clothes and hope that will be enough to hold him in place as everything -- his surroundings, his coherency, his sense of the passage of time -- disintegrates before Shizuo’s motion. His legs are aching, his underutilized muscles protesting this uncommonly rough use; but Izaya isn’t feeling them, is barely aware of the hurt any more than he’s aware of his body straining to take pressure he hasn’t felt in months, to adjust itself to the fit of another person’s existence as Izaya hasn’t had occasion to do since he turned his back on Ikebukuro and Shizuo and everything he’s ever wanted all at the same time. Shizuo’s fingers are tightening on the sheets under Izaya’s shoulders, his grip tensing until Izaya wonders if the fabric will give way to the force, if the cloth won’t tear apart between the weight of his body and the drag of Shizuo’s fingers; but Shizuo is leaning in, too, ducking closer with every long forward stroke of his hips, and Izaya isn’t really thinking about the sheets. He’s arching up, dragging at Shizuo’s shirt to pull himself closer, to close the gap between them so he can reach the heat of Shizuo’s mouth on his, and Shizuo is gasping over him, the sound spilling over Izaya’s lips to flare warmth into him with every inhale he takes of the warm-sweet air.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, almost groaning, almost pleading, like he’s begging for something Izaya can’t make any sense of from the heat-haze of his own thoughts. “You feel--” broken off into a moan that carries more meaning than words would. Izaya feels dizzy, feels like he can’t get enough air, like his heart is pounding so hard it’s scattering all his thoughts as rapidly as they form; but his arm is sliding around Shizuo’s neck, his hold tightening on the other’s shoulders as his fingers wrench at Shizuo’s shirt, as every part of his body tries to force Shizuo down and closer to him.

“I love you,” Shizuo gasps, and Izaya hears himself whimper past gritted teeth, feels the words run through him like electricity jolting through him to chase down the beat of his heart and stop it in its tracks. “Izaya. I missed you so much, I wanted this so much” as he lets Izaya’s knee go to fall wide across the bed, as his hand drops to skim Izaya’s hip instead, to slide his fingers over the tension of the other’s stomach.

“I wanted you so much,” he says, and his fingers are curling around Izaya’s cock, and Izaya can feel everything in him tighten with the all-in shudder of anticipation, of expectation curling itself around the shape of inevitability at the touch of Shizuo’s hand. He makes a choking, broken-off noise, his fingers seize hard at Shizuo’s hair; and Shizuo keeps moving, sweeping aside all Izaya’s attempts at restraint as if they aren’t even there to urge the other forward towards fast-rising pleasure.

“Izaya,” he says, and his voice is so low Izaya can feel it in the depths of his stomach, can feel it against the length of his spine, the sound of it granted its true weight by Shizuo’s presence, by the full effect of his voice in reality instead of modulated through a phone or the barrier of a wall. Izaya gasps a breath, feels everything in him tighten into a moment of involuntary, anticipatory strain; and then Shizuo’s fingers drag over him, and Shizuo’s cock drives hard into him, and everything in Izaya gives way at once. His head goes back, his throat opens up, and he’s moaning into helpless heat, “ _Shizu-chan_ ” spilling hot into the air as his cock jerks and pulses wet over the trembling ripples of sensation that are running through the tension of his stomach and the gasp of his breathing in his chest. Shizuo makes a low sound, raw and satisfied in a way Izaya can feel thrum at the very base of his spine; and then he lets his hold on Izaya’s cock go, and reaches down, and when his fingers close at Izaya’s hip it’s with all the bruising force of a promise.

“Izaya,” he says again, and when he moves it’s hard, with force enough to rock Izaya forward into the necessary restraint of that hold. Izaya whimpers with the surge of sensation, of Shizuo moving into him against the convulsive waves of pleasure still coursing through him, but he doesn’t let his hold on Shizuo’s hair go, and Shizuo doesn’t so much as hesitate in his motion. “God, you.” He’s driving deep with each thrust, his hips snapping forward with his full strength behind each motion; Izaya feels like he’s coming apart, like he’s being remade, like everything he pretended to be for so long is collapsing to the irresistible force of Shizuo inside him, Shizuo over him, Shizuo too immediate and too real for even he to turn aside from. And he’s still clinging to the other, still bracing himself as close to Shizuo as he can get even as his breathing starts to hiccup into too-much, even as the pulses of heat rushing through him strain the limits of his awareness and the boundaries of his physical strength.

“I love you,” Shizuo says against Izaya’s shoulder, rushing over the words like it’s the first time for his confession all over again, like he’s tasting the words fresh at his lips. “ _Izaya_ ” and his body flexes forward, his cock slides deep, and he gasps himself into relief so intense it sounds almost like a sob of pain at Izaya’s ear. Izaya can feel the wave of pleasure run through Shizuo’s body over him, can feel the surge of pent-up tension giving way to the shuddering heat of orgasm as Shizuo comes into him, and for a moment he can’t find air for his lungs for the disbelieving gratitude that hits him that he is allowed to have this again, Shizuo panting at his shoulder and hot inside him and shaking like he’s on the verge of collapse, like pleasure has done what pain never could and untangled all the knots of too-much strength that he bears like such a burden. His hand is still fisted in the sheets next to Izaya’s shoulder, his fingers are still printing bruises against Izaya’s skin; but when Izaya pulls at the front of Shizuo’s shirt it’s Shizuo who capitulates to Izaya’s strength, Shizuo’s muscles that give way to let him fall pleasure-heavy against the support of Izaya beneath him. His shirt catches between their bodies, undone buttons pressing their shape in against the gaps between Izaya’s ribs as the thin of his undershirt sticks and dampens with the spill of come across Izaya’s stomach, but Izaya doesn’t flinch back, and when Shizuo moves it’s only to let the sheets go so he can press his hand up to cradle Izaya’s head instead.

“God,” he says again, his voice shaky and half-muffled against Izaya’s shoulder. “I do love you.”

He makes it sound like an epiphany, like he’s barely believing his own words, like he’s only just seeing the way they fit to the shape of his experience the way his body fits to Izaya’s. Izaya wants to tease him for it, wants to spike irritation high enough to dig those nails at his hip into crescent bruises; but he stays quiet instead, as he has stayed quiet since his brief instruction to Shizuo, because he’s not sure he can speak without his breathing spilling into tears in his throat.

Lies are easy for him to manufacture, to spill carelessly to anyone who can be persuaded to listen. He’s not sure he can find the strength to offer sincerity to match Shizuo’s.


	18. Clarity

Izaya wakes up disoriented.

It’s hard for a moment to realize why. It’s not unusual for him to wake confused about his location, to stir from fast-fading dreams only to think himself back in Ikebukuro, in the tangle of his sheets or amidst the soft of Shizuo’s; it inevitably takes him minutes to free himself from the force of those not-quite-fantasies, to bring himself back through time to the present moment and his current existence, as a visitor in a city not his own and alone in an empty bed. But today he knows where he is immediately, before he even opens his eyes to look out at the familiar silhouettes of the furniture filling the room that he still hesitates to entirely claim as his own; there’s no way to lose himself to the past, with the dull ache in his legs to pull him to consciousness. But the disorientation doesn’t fade with his acknowledgment of his surroundings and his present location, because the weight at his hip doesn’t vanish, and the warmth against his skin doesn’t fade away, and the vaguely pleasant ache of past-tense friction inside him lingers even when Izaya’s staring wide-eyed at the curtains drawn over the glow of sunlight on the other side of his window.

He lies still for a long time, waiting for his immediate surroundings to flicker and fade like they always do to leave him inevitably alone again; but memory returns before reality does, his mind stirring itself to unwilling effort to return over the hours of interaction before the night: Shizuo’s arrival on a train platform, the shape of a scowl across a restaurant table, the sound of a front door opening from the other side of a bedroom door. Hands on skin, clothing sliding free, Izaya’s name pulled out long on heat and want; and Shizuo in his bed, Shizuo bracing him down and moving into him, sweat-slick skin sliding over itself to draw heat past Izaya’s lips, to draw relief from Shizuo’s, until finally even Shizuo’s stamina gave out to leave him collapsed into the boneless depths of exhaustion over Izaya’s bed. Izaya had thought of a shower, briefly, in the distant, daydreaming way of something he knows he won’t really do; and then he let himself go slack over the bed, and followed Shizuo into sleep undisturbed by any but gentle dreams.

They’re closer now than they were when they fell asleep. Shizuo has turned over in the span of hours that brought them through the night, has reached out somewhere in the depths of his unconscious motion to curl an arm around Izaya’s waist, to pull the other in close against the span of his chest, left bare after they managed to work off the tangle of his clothing between their first round of pleasure and the second. His leg is kicked out too, his calf angled over Izaya’s knees to pin them down to the sheets like he’s trying to stave off a possible retreat before it begins. In Ikebukuro Izaya would have slipped sideways to free himself, would have been gone by the time Shizuo stirred towards consciousness just for the principle of the thing; here he lies still, as motionless as if Shizuo’s hold really is the full-strength restraint it echoes, feeling his heartbeat rush in his chest while the memory of Shizuo’s words winds itself into his blood and bones as a tether far more unbreakable than the unconscious weight of an arm or leg.

Izaya wonders if Shizuo feels the connection between them with the same force he does. Izaya feels it like a weight, like a fist seizing to crush his ribs and squeeze the breath from him, to deprive him of the necessities he has always relied on for his own continued existence. But Shizuo bears it with such ease, as if he doesn’t notice the burden at all, as if it weighs light as feathers on his shoulders. Is it another function of his inhuman strength, that he can so casually offer those words that crush Izaya even in the hearing, that choke Izaya’s breathing in his throat when he so much as thinks to offer them? Is it something else, some greater resilience that he bears in his own psyche; or perhaps it’s Izaya who is the fragile one, here, who would rather bear the unbroken fall from a rooftop or the shattering force of a punch to crack and crush his body than offer the admission Shinra, Shizuo, even Celty can give up with such graceful ease. Maybe it’s some measure of humanity, that willingness to lean so far into vulnerability, to open up the cage of one’s chest to another and trust the other person to not destroy you; or to let the destruction come and emerge victorious from the apocalypse, to shake away the pain of the past and stride forward into a new day.

Izaya doesn’t know how to do it, doesn’t know how anyone can stand to let such an impact land without crushing them to nothingness; he’s spent his whole life flinching back and running away, keeping as much distance as he can between himself and whatever connections he may be able to form. Even with his body as broken as his heart he found a way to run, to retreat to some presumed safety; but there’s no safety in distance any more than he has found in time, not when the ache is still fresh enough to weight his thumbs at the buttons of an old phone and pull him bodily back into the past. And now: not the past, not the future, but the present, Shizuo’s heartbeat thudding close against Izaya’s skin and Shizuo’s breathing ruffling the dark of Izaya’s hair, their bodies so near that Izaya can’t tell the span of his own existence from Shizuo’s, can’t tell which of them is warming the other to the hazy heat that is radiating from them both. There’s no distinction, now, between what was and what is, no line Izaya can draw to set his memories on one side and his reality on the other; and even if he could run away, he doesn’t think that he wants to try.

He moves slowly, carefully tipping sideways so he can keep from waking Shizuo up. The arm around him slides by an inch, dropping to lie against his hip instead of his waist, and behind him Shizuo huffs a breath and shifts in his sleep; but he doesn’t stir into consciousness, and that’s enough for Izaya. If he stretches he can reach the bedside table, where he left his phone to charge after collecting it from where it fell in that first precipitous rush of he and Shizuo coming together, and from there it’s easy to unhook the cable one-handed and bring the phone in towards him again.

He doesn’t open up his messages, doesn’t tap the speeddial to call and check his voicemail. There’s emails he could go through, information to review and sort through; but he’s not thinking about information, and he’s not thinking about work. He’s not thinking about much of anything, really; the number he’s dialing is too familiar for that, more a matter of muscle memory than anything deliberate. He enters in the digits one-handed, hits _Call_ without checking their accuracy; and then he lifts the phone to his ear, and takes a breath, and waits.

There’s a moment of delay before the ringing starts. Izaya imagines the signal of his call slipping out into the ether, winding through the cell network back to Ikebukuro, looking for a connection that isn’t within the bounds of the city limits, anymore. Trailing back over the distance, returning the way it came; and then settling into the span of the walls where it began to hum into a ringtone to fill the early-morning quiet of the room.

It takes Shizuo some time to wake. Izaya can feel the tension of returning consciousness in the other’s limbs against him, can hear the huff of discomfort at the back of his neck as the sound of the ringing phone stirs Shizuo from whatever dreams he was lost in. The arm around Izaya tightens for a moment, the leg over him flexes; and against his hair Shizuo makes a faint, confused sound, “Wha…?” so unformed it’s more of a groan than a coherent word.

“Your phone is ringing,” Izaya tells him without turning to look over his shoulder at Shizuo blinking himself into consciousness. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“Shit,” Shizuo mumbles, and pushes away from that easy hold he has on Izaya to roll over so he can track down the source of the sound humming through the space of the room. It takes him a moment to find his phone where he dropped it the night before; Izaya listens to the rustling, and the soft sounds of frustration from behind him, and the sound of the ringtone playing against his ear.

“There,” Shizuo says, a sound of triumph as he finally gets his hands on his phone; and then goes completely silent as he sees the caller ID on the screen. Izaya can hear him turn, can feel the weight of the other’s gaze dragging over him to see the fit of his hand on the phone at his ear, to see the strain at his shoulders; but he doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look back to meet Shizuo’s stare. “What are you--”

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Izaya repeats, talking fast so the words fall atop Shizuo’s question to override it out of importance. There’s a moment of quiet, silence stretching taut with Shizuo’s confusion, with Izaya’s unmoving resistance; and then Shizuo huffs a sigh, and Izaya lets his panic-held breath go as the ringing at his ear cuts off.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says. His voice sounds odd like this, with the reality of his speech muffled by the pillow under Izaya’s head and the faint static of the phone delayed to make an echo of transmitted speech. He sounds hesitant, like he’s unsure about the present moment and inching his way out into the interaction with a frown of confusion still creasing his lips; Izaya can imagine the expression without even turning around to see it. “What do you want?”

Izaya takes a breath, a deep one, as deep as he can make it. The air strains at his chest, expands his ribs wide around the necessity of the oxygen, presses hard against that imagined constriction trying to crush the life out of him; and then he lets it go at once, a single exhale of decision, and speaks immediately, before the tension can seize close around him again.

“I love you.” Fast, the words, rushing over each other past his lips; but clear, immediately coherent in a way that catches Shizuo’s breath on an inhale behind him. Izaya shuts his eyes, takes another breath; the tension is gone, now, his breathing comes easier, but his heart is speeding on such adrenaline he thinks he can feel it trembling through his shoulders, imagines he can see it quivering at the tips of his fingers. “Shizu-chan. I love you.” Another breath. He feels dizzy, like he’s disintegrating, like everything he has ever told himself he was is coming apart at the seams; he closes his free hand against the sheets under him, as if that is likely to do any good at all in holding him together. “That’s all.”

There’s complete silence from behind him for a moment. Shizuo doesn’t move, doesn’t answer, doesn’t offer any response at all; Izaya can’t even hear the sound of his breathing, through the pillow or from the phone either one. Then there’s a shift, the sound of the sheets sliding as Shizuo moves; and a touch against Izaya’s fingers, a hold closing carefully around the plastic case of his phone. Shizuo’s pull is immediate, too strong for Izaya to resist even if he realized what was happening before it was done, even if he thought he could still the shake in his hands enough to muster any kind of grip strength at all; as it is he’s almost grateful that Shizuo takes the weight before he drops it completely. He lets his empty hand fall to the side of his neck, to press his shaking fingers in against his racing pulse while Shizuo moves behind him to lean away towards the bedside table. There’s the sound of plastic tapping a hard surface as Shizuo sets their phones down, safe from the tangle of blankets around their legs; and then the bed shifts, the mattress moves as Shizuo tips back in. A hand presses to the sheets in front of Izaya’s face, a shadow falls over him; and then there’s a forehead pressing to Izaya’s hair, the gust of a breath against his ear, the warmth of skin pressing to his.

“Izaya,” Shizuo says, and his lips are almost against Izaya’s skin, his voice as close as it can be, as immediate as it can be, as clear as it can be. “I love you too.” And there’s the weight of lips pressing to Izaya’s skin, the heat of a kiss settling in just below the curve of his ear, and Izaya gasps a breath shaking itself into almost a sob, and lifts his hand from his skin to reach out for Shizuo’s instead.

When Shizuo’s mouth finds his, there’s no interference at all.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Who We Used to Be: Chapter 5 Illustration](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10972974) by [aerynevenstar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerynevenstar/pseuds/aerynevenstar)




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